Quotes About Ambivalence

I was going to kill someone today. I just wasn't sure who when I woke up this morning. I do love mornings. So full of possibilities.

I wish I could hate you," he said. His voice was light, his mouth curved in an unconcerned half smile, his eyes sick with misery. "I want to hate you. I try to hate you. It would be so much easier if I did hate you. Sometimes I do hate you and then I see you and I...

Burton makes it quite clear that the 'distinguished' nature of melancholy makes it superior to other forms of madness, as evidence of a refined nature. It is melancholy, after all, which afflicts scholars and poets: 'Melancholy men of all others are most witty.'32 Despite the drawbacks of the condition, his ambivalent attitude prefigures that of many modern depressives, who regard the disease as an essential component of their character, even their creativity.

Hurt and relieved, all at the same time. It always made my chest ache to feel two things at once, each so strongly.

I never know what to make of relationships. Part of me feels like they're not right, but then another part of me doesn't know how right it's reasonable to expect them to be.

But then there's the other kind. They're not used to being seen. They want it but they don't want it. It's like bright sunlight. You live in the dark all your life, you want nothing more than to step out into that warm sun. But then it hurts your eyes because it's too bright. It burns you.

Do you think, if Columbus had stood on the bow of his ship, looked at the New World and understood everything to come, all the disease and death and betrayal, all the ugliness, all the blood - do you think he would have embraced it, called it paradise?

under the surface there is often ambivalence about women at work that makes their position vulnerable.

Con la Sicilia i miei rapporti sono di qualità schizofrenica. E tuttavia, più mi sforzo di sbucciarmi di dosso la pelle indigena e di promuovermi "totus europeus", più tendo a raccogliermi e ricucirmi dentro la mia terra e la mia civiltà. Intervista di Leonardo Sciascia 1981

The hero worship had just become obvious. He felt that he ought to be resenting it. All the same, the whiff of incense was not unsweet in his nostrils. Rather the reverse.

Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle and end. Like my life, this book has ambiguity. Like my life, this book is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity, as Joanna said.

Oh, 'twould be marvelous if the world and its moral questions were like some game board, with plain black players and white, and fixed rules, and nary a shade of grey.

She revisited sex now as a ruined project she couldn't entirely give up on.

I have qualms and wonder what a qualm would look like if you painted it -- probably like a bowl of melting ice cream or a dish of Jell-o just before it sets.

There is nothing more pitiable in the world than an irresolute man vacillating between two feelings, who would willingly unite the two, and who does not perceive that nothing can unite them.

I'm not sure if I've had too much coffee, or if it's had me.

I hate you with the hate that I give to all the world; I love you with a feeling nothing else arouses.

I was guilty and irritated and full of love and pain. I wanted to kick him and I wanted to take him in my arms.

His touch could never fail to make me feel desire; yet his hot, sweet breath also made me want to vomit.

I was trembling. I thought, if I do not open the door at once and get out of here, I am lost. But I knew I could not open the door, I knew it was too late; soon it was too late to do anything but moan. He pulled me against him, putting himself into my arms as though he were giving me himself to carry, and slowly pulled me down with him to that bed. With everything in me screaming No! yet the sum of me sighed Yes.

She was like a wild animal who didn't know whether to come to the outstretched hand or to flee and kept making startled little rushes, first in one direction and then in the other.

No more calamities... I don't want you to stop trying to save the world, Cotton. But I don't want you to expect to save it, either.

There is something special about the beauty in the unclear, the ambiguity, the in-between that you can't totally recognise.

I like to play the grey areas in life - that's the most uncomfortable place to be. Nobody likes to be in that in-between state where there don't know what's going to happen. There's a lot of tension in that, and a lot of stuff to play with - where it's uncomfortable and awkward and sad and scary.