Quotes About Ambivalence

If I don't get enough attention, I want more attention. If I have too much attention, I want it to stop. It is not always easy to understand myself.

Being a mum is something that's never bothered me too much. I have never felt a strong need to have children, but I am not averse to it either.

Stuff that's hidden and murky and ambiguous is scary because you don't know what it does.

My generation has a hard time being genuine and enthusiastic. There's a lot of irony in our culture.

Characters can be mysterious and you're not really sure which way they might turn at a given point.

High? Low. Just like the old days. If you say so.

There was no stopping us now. We had running water, a heater, a cooker and a road. We were fast becoming slaves again to all the things we had come to this benighted spot to flee.

She stood there looking up at him as if he were a good man and would save her. He was debating whether or not he was that good. Unfortunately for her, he didn't think so.

Outside the bedroom Jane fumbled around and in her purse and produced a pack of cigarettes, but couldn't figure out whether to smoke one or not. "Holy Motown Jesus with Pips, what the fuck is going on in there?

Leave it up to hipster nerds to pretend to hate something that they actually want

I followed the curve that rose from the capitals of the semicircle of columns and ran along the ribs of the vault toward the key, mirroring the mystery of the ogive, that supreme static hypocrisy which rests on an absence, making the columns believe that they are thrusting the great ribs upward and the ribs believe that they are holding the columns down, the vault being both all and noting, at once cause and effect.

Fire is therefore too many things and – as well as being a psychological phenomenon – it becomes a symbol, and like all symbols it is ambiguous, polysemic and evokes different meanings according to the situation.

You cannot change the world through ideas. People with few ideas are less likely to make mistakes; they follow what everyone else does and are no trouble to anyone; they're successful, make money, find good jobs, enter politics, receive honours; they become famous writers, academics, journalists. Can anyone who is so good at looking after their own interests really be stupid? I'm the stupid one, the one who wanted to go tilting at windmills.

El francés no sabe bien qué quiere, lo único que sabe a la perfección es que no quiere lo que tiene. Y para decirlo no sabe sino cantar canciones.

I am like a man who looks at one side of a coin and then at the other, and they are different, and he can't decide which is the coin. I see co-operation, and that delights me; then I see repression, and that repels me. Which is the coin?

India is for me a difficult country. It isn't my home and cannot be my home; and yet I cannot reject it or be indifferent to it; I cannot travel only for the sights. I am at once too close and too far.

As we shall see, the hardcore anticorset contingent included many (but by no means all) doctors and many (but by no means all) feminists. Medical ambivalence about corsetry may well have been related, at least, in part, to the profession's general opposition to feminist claims. But feminists and female doctors were themselves ambivalent about corsetry

It is certainly possible that some women might have felt ambivalent or embarassed about pregnancy, which could have led them to try to conceal the condition under tight corsets. It is also possible that some women deliberately used tight-lacing in an attempt to abort the fetus.

Leni thought maybe that he would haunt her. Not just him, but the idea of him, the sad and scary truth that you could love and hate the same person at the same time, that you could feel a deep and abiding loss and shame for your own weakness and still be glad that this awful thing had been done.

For minutes on end he could not tell whether he was really hearing howls of pain, or whether it was simply that his years of long, exhausting work had rendered him incapable of distinguishing between the general noise and ancient prehistoric screams that were somehow preserved in time and now were being raised by the rain, like dust.

And I liked Ted Burgess in a reluctant, half-admiring, half-hating way. When I was away from him I could think of him objectively as a working farmer whom no one at the Hall thought much of. But when I was with him his mere physical presence cast a spell on me, it established an ascendancy which I could not break. He was, I felt, what a man ought to be, what I should like to be when I grew up.

Is it good or bad?" she asked Issa. The wrong question, she knew. She just couldn't help herself. "It's both, sweet girl," said Issa. "like everything.

They hated the humans, but they also wanted to be them. They wanted to punish them, and they wanted to be embraced by them. To be accepted, honored, loved, like someone's child.

For I hate, yet love thee, so, That, whichever thing I show, The plain truth will seem to be A constrained hyperbole, And the passion to proceed More from a mistress than a weed.