Quotes About Ambivalence

Then I feel so happy and at the same time so sad, it's unimaginable.

When you're trying to please both sides of the fence at the same time you really can't do that.

In one way, I suppose, I have been 'in denial' for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light.

They may have had time to destroy them, and I don't know the answer.

I've always been anxious about 'Primer.' There's good things about it, but all I've seen for a long time is the flaws.

I lost all feeling a long time ago. Basketball is basketball. It doesn't matter what floor I'm on.

I never knew until I came here to Hollywood that somebody could be really nice to you for years and really hate your guts. Happens all the time here.

Sometimes good art jumps out at me; most of the time I see bad art, or see nothing at all and just drift, feeling weird, pretending to be fine.

Look, we're in the time of the anti-hero.

It's complicated, being an American, Having the money and the bad conscience, both at the same time.

I was there laughing and joking with everyone else, but it's like there was some part of me standing back, watching, thinking, "Is this as good as it gets?

Rule the world, Raistlin repeated softly, his eyes burning. Rule the world? You still don't undestand, do you, my dear sister? Let me make this as plain as I know how. Now it was his turn to stand up. Pressing his thin hands upon the desk, he leaned towards her, like a snake. I don't give damn about the world! he said softly. I could rule it tomorrow, if I wanted it! I don't.

they go along together without any sign of impatience, in the way they are alone in a crowd, without happiness, it seems, without sadness, without curiosity, going along without seeming to, without meaning to just going this way rather than that, alone in the crowd, never alone even by themselves, always alone even in the crowd.

It was just that this was real life and no decision was clearly sign-posted. It's not like you take the right turning and you get everlasting happiness and you take the wrong one and you're life's a disaster. In real life it's often almost impossible to tell which decision is the one you should make because what you stand to gain and what you stand to lose are sometimes--often--neck and neck.

Excitement doesn't knock at your door any less when you're older than when you're younger. It's just that when you're younger, you're more likely to open the door and let it in. With age, you start growing ambivalent about excitement. You might say that you want it, but at the same time you're not sure you have the energy for it. Yet a surefire way to diminish your energy is to deny the Ultimate energy pill, which is participation in life itself.

But there is something about human beings that too often makes our love for the world look very much like hatred for it.

Besides, what Dominican woman wouldn't like to be the First Lady?

It's a common feeling for people to feel intermittent antipathy toward individuals they're familiar with.

He hated it as if he were about to love it—unforgivingly, irrationally, sadly.

Lying in bed and smoking my sixth or seventh cigarette of the morning, I'm wondering what the hell I'm going to do today. Oh yeah, I gotta write this thing. But that's not work, really, is it? It feels somehow shifty and . . . dishonest, making a buck writing.

But what was the matter with me these days was that I didn't like care much. It was like something soft getting into me and I could not pony why. What I wanted these days I did not know.

This was a glimpse through that mysterious door, once shut, that now seemed to stand ajar. It was as if sounds of far-off conflict, or the muffled din of music and shouting, dimly heard in the past, had now come closer than ever before. Stringham

I don't like anybody or anything, said Lucinda. Yes, you do;--you like horses to ride, and dresses to wear.

They who know the agonies of an ambitious, indolent, doubting, self-accusing man,—of a man who has a skeleton in his cupboard as to which he can ask for sympathy from no one,—will understand what feelings were at work within the bosom of Sir Thomas when his Percycross friends left him alone in his chamber.