Quotes About Ambivalence

It's a hard life... but if I could, I would do it all again.

If I've been accused a number of times of writing plays where the endings are ambivalent, indeed, that's the way I find life.

Suspense left my life a long time ago, now it has returned. I do not care for it.

What can I say about life? Do I praise it for letting you live, or damn it for allowing the rest?

There are always loose ends in real life.

Everything in life is gray, you know.

And this vague little smile is my all purpose expression the meaning of which I will leave to your discretion.

I don't care if I never do another TV show in my life.

I've never had any intentions about anything. That's why I am where I am today, which is neither here nor there, in a literal sense.

No diagnosis, no prognosis.

Besides, I hated him but I loved him too. Yes. I know all about that sort of thing. Christ, I should, I'd heard nothing else my last two years in New York. 'They have this terrific love-hate thing going,' everybody said about everybody else. 'You watch, it's going to destroy them-.' But never about me . When I took to someone I took to them, and when I took against them ditto. Mostly I felt indifference.

I looked at those patient huddlers on the [Embassy] benches who had hardly moved, and a horrible irony hit me: they wanted so badly to get into the States; I wanted so badly to stay out.

Was it possible? She had taken me with her hoping that as a punishment my parents would not send me to middle school? Or had she brought me back in such a hurry so that I would avoid punishment? Or - I wonder today - did she want at different moments both things?

What's got into me? Do I want children? Do I want to be a mamma, nursing and singing lullabies? Marriage plus pregnancy? And if my mother should emerge from my stomach just now when I think I'm safe?

Fiz muitas coisas em minha vida, mas jamais convicta, sempre me senti um tanto descolada de minhas próprias ações.

Today I know what I felt, but then I didn't understand. At that instant I had only an unpleasant impression, as if he had given the signal and from then on all I could do was to sink by degrees into repugnance. In reality I felt above all a blaze of hatred toward myself, because I was there, because I had no excuses, because it was I who had decided to come, because it seemed to me that I could not retreat.

El único problema ha sido siempre la agitación de la cabeza. No puedo detenerla, siempre tengo que hacer, rehacer, cubrir, descubrir, reforzar, y luego, de repente, deshacer, romper.

Loving courses together with hating, and I can't, I can't manage to solidify myself around any goodwill.

I slipped away, and am still slipping away, within these lines that are intended to give me a story yet in fact are nothing, nothing of mine, nothing that has really begun or really been brought to completion, only a tangled knot, and nobody, not even she who at this moment is writing, knows if it contains the right thread for a story or is merely a snarled confusion of suffering, without redemption.

For the first time in my life, I couldn't think of anything I particularly wanted to study or to do. I still had the old idea of being a writer, but that was being, not doing. It didn't say what you were supposed to do.

I thought about how wonderful it would be to walk around with him until the following morning. I really felt that way, even though he stressed me out so much, and all we ever did was mishear each other and say "What?" all the time.

The Other," I repeated, to buy time. I was pretty sure that the Other was a French construct having something to do with either sex or colonialism. "That's

It couldn't have been depressing, because my mother had worked so hard to make it not be depressing. And yet—was it possible that how hard my mother worked was part of why it had been depressing?

Whether this was fashion or indigence was never clear to me.