Quotes About Ambivalence

There were moments bristling with deadness, when she looked out at her life and went, What? Or worse, feeling interrupted and tired, Wha—?

She hated money! though she knew it was like blood and you needed it. Still, it was also like blood in that she often couldn't stand the sight of it.

Oh, she said. I wasn't going to ask, but then you never said anything about it, so I thought I'd ask. How about you? Not me, said Odette. She had a poem about marriage. It began, Marriage is the death you want to die, and in front of audiences she never read it with much conviction. Usually she swung her foot back and forth through the whole thing.

There were about thirty-five people, all of them middle-aged, with the academic's strange mixed expression of merriment and weariness. "A cross between flirtation and a fender bender," Martin had described it once.

There was now enormous British ambivalence toward Pierpont.

I shudder to think of what I should have been if I had remained in Richford all my life," he later confided.

Describing an unsatisfactory apartment for which an up-and-comer had to settle:] The flat crouched around him, watching like a depressed relation, waiting for him to take some action.

It is only in the extremes, on the margins of existence, where life is worth living, where we can learn what's possible for ourselves and for the rest of humanity. The middle of the road leads nowhere , it reveals nothing about man other than ambivalence and fear.

This is trouble with you. You think you want, you don't think you want–always back and forth. Me, when I want, it is with whole heart. I look at wanted thing with eyes straight on. But you! Neither here nor there. Your looking always crooked, from side of eye. It has no power to hold. So wanted thing, it slip away from you.

It also felt like home, and she wasn't sure she liked it.

I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations - one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it - you will regret both.

If love is a yearning to be like (even to become) the beloved, then hatred, it must be said, can be engendered by the same ambition, when it cannot be fulfilled.

Even great Bellow, he saw in the Times, had been unclear on the question of the heart, and had asked on his deathbed: "Was I a man, or was I a jerk?

Here in America, the only words that didn't exist, the only unspeakable words, were "I'm not sure about any of this. I'm having second thoughts.

It is a big problem and so I don't know for sure if I say yes or no to Ferrari.

It was a great game if you don't care who won. I cared.

It is true that success is the most boring thing, it is tinny and brittle, failure runs deeper. Success is dangerous. I have a very complicated relationship with that word.

There is anything but an assurance of success, I have to be very clear about that.

My secret for success? I don't know what the hell success means.

I often feel more disgust than pride about this kind of success. So there's no regret whatsoever.

The Count of Morcerf was no favorite with his colleagues. Like all upstarts, he had had recourse to a great deal of haughtiness to maintain his position.

At the very first you were quite obviously and incomprehensibly indifferent toward me and probably for this reason seemed familiar.

I was thinking myself about changing into a different sort of person from the one I am. I do think about that. I read a book called The Art of Loving. A lot of things seemed clear while I was reading it but afterwards I went back to being more or less the same.

Poison and medicine are often the same thing, given in different proportions