Quotes About Ambivalence

I wouldn't want to live without strong misgivings.

There is no light. I don't feel like starting my generator. I used to get a big kick out saving people's lives. Now I wonder what the hell's the point, since they all have to die anyway.Dr. Stubbs Catch -22

Yossarian was not sure he liked being invested in.

Would you like to see our country lose?' Major Major asked. 'We won't lose. We've got more men, more money and more material. There are ten million men in uniform who could replace me. Some people are getting killed and a lot more are making money and having fun. Let somebody else get killed.' 'But suppose everybody on our side felt that way.' 'Then I'd certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way. Wouldn't I?

I wouldn't want to live without strong misgivings.

She's out from my life, I don't know whether to laugh or cry

No American sport or activity has been so consistently and so passionately under attack as boxing, for moral as we'll as other reasons. And no American sport evokes so ambivalent a response in its defenders: when asked the familiar question How can you watch . . . ? the boxing aficionado really has no answer. He can talk about boxing only with others like himself.

She is frightened but she is thrilled. She is thrilled but she is frightened.

There was a way of looking at the world where practically every single thing that happened had some kind of double meaning.

identification is always an ambivalent process. Identifying with a gender under contemporary regimes of power involves identifying with a set of norms that are and are not realizable, and whose power and status precede the identifications by which they are insistently approximated.

THE SAD, NOT-SO-SAD, BALLAD OF GOAT-HEAD JEAN, AMBIVALENT DEVIL QUEEN BY MICHAEL LOUIS CALVILLO

In their ambivalent attitude to violence, the Hindus are no different from the rest of us, but they are perhaps unique in the intensity of their ongoing debate about it.

Just because you're fighting evil doesn't mean you're good. And just because you're doing evil doesn't mean you're bad. You end up with the conclusion that there is no ultimate right or wrong. It's all shades of gray.

Sometimes I want to clean up my desk and go out and say, "Respect me; I'm a respectable grown-up!" and other times I just want to jump into a paper bag and shake and bake myself to death.

Standing beneath the white light of an Apple store is like standing on a Stanley Kubrick movie set. His '2001: A Space Odyssey' predicted Jobs and a future where technology was our friend. Kubrick, of course, didn't like what he saw. And occasionally, I have my doubts.

Yet alongside this rebellion against the father, a respect for and acceptance of his authority continued to exist. This ambivalent attitude toward authority— rebellion against it coupled with acceptance and submission —is a basic feature of every middle-class structure from the age of puberty to full adulthood and is especially pronounced in individuals stemming from materially restricted circumstances.

Which do you prefer, she says. Sex or Violence? I try to smile. What's the difference, really.

I didn't know how to feel. I'd been rebuffed. I hadn't even been trying to buff.

In those years, I felt myself to be incomplete—a gray blur, a body in motion, forever galloping toward completion—half a girl, half-caste, half-mast, and half-baked, not quite ready for consumption.

In my experience, you never get silver linings without clouds. Even then I knew enough of the world to understand that inner circles are always heavily fortified against newcomers, and royal favor always arouses jealousy.

It was such an odd thing to be fighting against something so violently and yet wanting it to happen so completely.

don't think there is a right or wrong anymore," Thomas said, hearing the numbness in his own voice. He desperately wanted sleep. "Only horrible and not-quite-so-horrible.

To doubt," Os Guinness writes, "is to waver between the two, to believe and disbelieve at once and to be 'in two minds.

Part of me still loves. More of me doesn't.