Quotes About Ambivalence

She didn't want to handle him. She didn't want anything to do with him - this man with his cold, intense eyes and clipped speech, this stranger, this Yankee. He made her feel like a rabbit facing a cobra: terrified, but fascinated at the same time. He tried to hide his ruthlessness behind smooth, cosmopolitan manners, but Evie had no doubts about the real nature of the man. He wanted her. He intended to have her. And he wouldn't care if he destroyed her in the taking.

Even in The Liberal Imagination, a book with a clear polemical purpose, ambivalence about the educative value of literature lurks in the background of many of the essays.

The true way goes over a rope which is not stretched at any great height but just above the ground. It seems more designed to make people stumble than to be walked upon.

He contained two equal sorts of knowledge: the warm lazy knowledge that above on the mountain a blond girl in a white dress waited for him, shy and eager; and the cooler knowledge that this was unlikely and the good of climbing was the exercise and view from the top. There was no conflict between these knowledges, his mind passed easily from one to the other, but when he stood up to begin the last of the climb the thought of the girl was stronger.

I am, and wish I wasn't.

We dreamt of light, but hoped for darkness.

Voglio dire che prima o poi smetterà di rompermi i coglioni ovunque io vada, e io proverò lo stesso sollievo che si prova quando in una stanza si spegne il motore del frigorifero, ma anche lo stesso sgomento inevitabile, e la sensazione, che lei certo conoscerà, di non essere sicuri di sapere cosa farsene di quell'improvviso silenzio, e forse di non esserne in fondo all'altezza. Le sembra di aver capito?

Questa è la riva del mare. […] Né terra né mare. E' un luogo che non esiste.

Sia così gentile allora da dirgli che mi mancherà. Voglio dire che prima o poi smetterà di rompermi i coglioni ovunque io vada, e io proverò lo stesso sollievo che si prova quando in una stanza si spegne il motore del frigorifero, ma anche lo stesso sgomento inevitabile, e la sensazione, che lei certo conoscerà, di non essere sicuri di sapere cosa farsene di quell'improvviso silenzio, e forse di non esserne in fondo all'altezza.

Danglers alone was content and joyous, he had got rid of an enemy and preserved his situation on board the Pharaon; Danglers was one of those men born with a pen behind the ear, and an ink-stand in place of a heart. Everything with him was multiplication or subtraction, and he estimated the life of a man as less precious than a figure, when that figure could increase, and that life would diminish, the total of the amount.

Are you happy here?" I said at last. He considered this for a moment. "Not particularly," he said. "But you're not very happy where you are, either.

Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is the way you can both hate and love something you are not sure you understand.

You shouldn't ask me whether I like him or not. The way you mean it, I don't suppose I like anybody.

once, didn't ye? He weren't so sure about

Runs the gamut of emotions from A to B.

Technology . . . is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other." ?—Carrie Snow

Technology . . . is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other." —Carrie Snow "Beam

Hell, I was pretty sure I still loved her, even though I now hated her also.

If the answer isn't clear to you, you're not alone—even mathematicians argue about what it means to assign a probability to a single event.

To me, most of life kind of lives in the grey and I don't just mean morally. I just mean kind of everything. If things were black and white it would be a lot clearer as to what to do all the time.

I've never been more confused in my life, but at the same time I've never been more satisfied with what we've done.

The tension between 'yes' and no', between 'I can' and 'I cannot,' makes us feel that, in so many instances, human life is an interminable debate with one's self.

I want to swim in both directions at once. Desire success, court failure.

Thus I am not able to exist either with you or without you; and I seem not to know my own wishes.