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Quotes About Ambivalence

The less obvious hurdle is that of preparing parents emotionally and putting forward realistic images of parenthood and motherhood. There also needs to be some sort of acknowledgement that not everyone should parent - when parenting is a given, it's not fully considered or thought out, and it gives way too easily to parental ambivalence and unhappiness.
~ Jessica Valenti
I want to think and at the same time that's the last thing in the world I want to do.
~ Erich Maria Remarque
He it is still and yet it is not he any longer. His features have become uncertain and faint, like a photographic plate from which two pictures have been taken. Even his voice sounds like ashes.
~ Erich Maria Remarque
most of the time, but I didn't want anything
~ Erin McCarthy
We fear our highest possibility (as well as our lowest ones). We are generally afraid to become that which we can glimpse in our most perfect moments…. We enjoy and even thrill to the godlike possibilities we see in ourselves in such peak moments. And yet we simultaneously shiver with weakness, awe and fear before these very same possibilities.
~ Ernest Becker
After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love, and I was sure this was a very good story although I would not know truly how good until I read it over the next day.
~ Ernest Hemingway
He's so damned nice and he's so awful. He's my sort of thing.
~ Ernest Hemingway
Vaguely he wanted a girl but he did not want to have to work to get her. He would have liked to have a girl but he did not want to have to spend a long time getting her. He did not want to get into the intrigue and the politics. He did not want to have to do any courting. He did not want to tell any more lies. It wasn't worth it.
~ Ernest Hemingway
Nick did not want to go in there now. He felt a reaction against deep wading with the water deepening up under his armpits, to hook big trout in places impossible to land them. In the swamp the banks were bare, the big cedars came together overhead, the sun did not come through, except in patches; in the fast deep water, in the half light, the fishing would be tragic. In the swamp fishing was a tragic adventure. Nick did not want it. He did not want to go down the stream any farther today. He
~ Ernest Hemingway
Where am I? What the hell difference is it? There's plenty o' fresh air and the moon fur a glim. Don't be so damn pertic'lar!
~ Eugene O'Neill
But, like lots of people she knew, she mostly wanted it so she wouldn't have to want it anymore, so that people would get off her back about how she didn't have any.
~ Andrew Martin
New York, which I had complained about for so long, became a beacon, a place I missed terribly whenever I was away and then glutted myself on until I was sick when I came back. You move away from the city and suddenly everyone wants to have drinks. Nobody'll hang out unless you leave.
~ Andrew Martin
Men are confused. They're conflicted. They want a woman who's their intellectual equal, but they're afraid of women like that. They want a woman they can dominate, but then they hate her for being weak. It's an ambivalence that goes back to a man's relationship with his mother. Source of his life, center of his universe, object of both his fear and his love.
~ Andrew Schneider
But if I'm to choose between one evil and another, then I prefer not to choose at all.
~ Andrzej Sapkowski
Men om jag ska välja mellan två onda ting, då föredrar jag att inte välja alls.
~ Andrzej Sapkowski
Evil is evil, Stregobor," said the witcher seriously as he got up. "Lesser, greater, middling, it's all the same. Proportions are negotiated, boundaries blurred. I'm not a pious hermit. I haven't done only good in my life. But if I'm to choose between one evil and another, then I prefer not to choose at all. Time for me to go. We'll see each other tomorrow." "Maybe
~ Andrzej Sapkowski
I haven't done only good in my life. But if I'm to choose between one evil and another, then I prefer not to choose at all.
~ Andrzej Sapkowski
This was getting out of control. I was about to back out of the room when
~ Andy Andrews
The victim is always morally superior to the master; that is the victim's ambivalent triumph. That is why there have been so few notoriously wicked women in comparison to the number of notoriously wicked men; our victim status ensures that we rarely have the opportunity.
~ Angela Carter
I think I want to be in love with you but I don't know how.
~ Angela Carter
What Everard and Philip felt about the hard luck, to give it no harder name, that might tear all their ex-pupils (for they could not help looking at the situation from their own schoolmastering point of view and especially from the point of view of their own school) from their various avocations and pitchfork them into the paths of glory which may lead but to the grave, was so mixed that neither of them could quite have put it into words.
~ Angela Thirkell
I am a person whose father had no religion but who went to the nuns for a couple of years. And I think I'm the same: On one hand, I pray on the other hand, I don't believe. I am constantly between the two.
~ Anjelica Huston
As always after a trip home, he wondered why he found it so difficult to get on with his father. There were never arguments, no real antagonism, but he always left feeling an edgy mixture of guilt and inadequacy.
~ Ann Cleeves
It was typical that now he was being offered what he'd dreamed of he couldn't make a decision.
~ Ann Cleeves