Quotes About Ambivalence

All this was not very pleasant to John Morton. He

If Kayla is alive, I wonder if she really wants to be.

He felt no regrets as the work of a lifetime was swept away. He had labored to take man to the stars, and, in the moment of success, the stars—the aloof, indifferent stars—had come to him.

I'm not sure about whether I shall go. I am the most incurably lazy devil that ever stood in shoe leather--that is, when the fit is on me, for I can be spry enough at times.

We have all found by experience that it is especially difficult for an obsessional neurotic to carry out the fundamental rule of psycho-analysis. [...] While he is engaged in thinking, his ego has to keep off too much—the intrusion of unconscious phantasies and the manifestation of ambivalent trends. It must not relax, but is constantly prepared for a struggle.

In extreme cases the patient manages to make most of his symptoms acquire, in addition to their original meaning, a directly contrary one. This is a tribute to the power of ambivalence, which, for some unknown reason, plays such a large part in obsessional neuroses.

At a certain point in her life, she realizes it is not so much that she wants to have a child as that she does not want not to have a child, or not to have had a child' (109).

I believe that fear of being a failure plays a large part in goading many women who are ambivalent about motherhood into maternity. That, and the fear of missing out

Never to be outdone, my wife, who also happens to be a psychoanalyst and therefore a specialist in ambivalence, wrote the following to me: 'Dear Simon, Break a leg, or all your legs. I better brake fast. With all my love-hate, Jamieson (who is about to drive us off a cliff)

the inherent properties of matter start to become impossibly ambiguous.

En la Naturaleza, nada está nunca completamente claro: los tipos, macho y hembra, no siempre se distinguen con nitidez.

I wouldn't care whether it was a laboratory or a carnival. But it's merely safe. Tell me, Mr. Pollock, what is the matter with Gopher Prairie?

I'm not sure about whether I shall go. I am the most incurably lazy devil that ever stood in shoe leather -- that is, when the fit is on me, for I can be spry enough at times. ~ Sherlock Holmes

Alcohol is a pervasive fact of life, but an extraordinary fact-pleasurable and destructive, anathematized and adulated, and deeply ambiguous ... the genie in the bottle.

You are entering a phase of your life in which many different things will occur...bad things that seem good at first and good things that seem bad at first.

It's amazing to me how hard people work to maintain a life they hate.

Sometimes I Curse My Love Affair with Life

I want to stay still and to keep moving. I want this life and another.

Fame, if not double-faced, is double-mouthed,And with contrary blast proclaims most deeds;On both his wings, one black, the other white,Bears greatest names in his wild airy flight.

He couldn't think of a good place. At first he thought she hated all living beings equally. Lately he had come to believe he held a special place in her heart, just below rattlesnakes, pederasts, and spirochetes. Definitely a tough place to start from, but determination had always been Conal's strong point.

And I, a twister, love, what I abhor.

I hate and I love, Catullus said, speaking of that Clodia Pulcher whose family caused so much difficulty in Rome, even in our time and long after her death. It is not enough; but what better way might we begin to discover that self which is never wholly pleased or displeased with what the world offers?

He felt both shame and pride, and over it all a bitter disappointment, in himself and in the time and circumstance that made him possible.

Edith smiled at him with a curious mixture of fondness and contempt.