Quotes About Ambivalence

The universe just does not give a shit.

This is where the Iliad begins, and it should be the focus of all my energies and professional skills, but the truth is that I don't really give a shit.

Maybe, Gwen said, instead of yes yes yes yes yes yes yes.

the fact that both of these hostile camps could make use of the same examples to prove diametrically opposed interpretations suggests a truth about how all of us read and interpret literary texts—one that is, possibly, rooted in the mysteries of human nature itself. Where some people see chaos and incoherence, others will find sense and symmetry and wholeness.

Life is full of tough decisions, and nothing makes them easy. But the worst ones are really your personal koans, and tormenting ambivalence is just the sense of satori rising. Try, trust, and trust again, and eventually you'll feel your mind change its focus to a new level of understanding.

I have now reached the happy age of 23. No, happy is not quite the right word. At this particular moment I am certainly not happy.

She wasn't trying to overcome life, only to get along with it, to blend with the processes she could scarcely understand in a world that had permitted her no solid ground.

I wonder how Blackwater Park will look in the daytime? I don't altogether like it by night.

Let the end come as it may, here I am ready to profit by it: here I am, facing both ways, with perfect ease and security - a moral agriculturist, with his eye on two crops at once, and his swindler's sickle ready for any emergency. For the next week to come, the newspaper will be more interesting to me than ever. I wonder which side I shall eventually belong to?

For one and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent. For example, music is good to the melancholy, bad to mourners, and indifferent to the dead.

I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!

He puts his shoes on, stomping into them, like he does everything, like he is hoping all the time he really cant do it and can quit trying to.

here it is it was right here all the time was it come on I got up and followed we went up the hill the crickets hushing before us its funny how you can sit down and drop something and have to hunt all around for it the gray it was gray with dew slanting up into the gray sky then the trees beyond damn that honeysuckle I wish it would stop you used to like it we

Sometimes it was mild elation. Often it was a pleasant melancholy.

Being out in big surf is dreamlike. Terror and ecstasy ebb and flow around the edges of things, each threatening to overwhelm the dreamer. An unearthly beauty saturates an enormous arena of moving water, latent violence, too-real explosions, and sky. Scenes feel mythic even as they unfold. I always feel a ferocious ambivalence: I want to be nowhere else; I want to be anywhere else.

My ambivalence about the sport we shared appalled him. It was heresy. Surfing, to begin with, was not a "sport." It was a "path." And the more you poured into it, the more you got back from it—he himself was the exuberant proof of that. I

Laney had recently noticed that the only people who had titles that clearly described their jobs had jobs he wouldn't have wanted.

You don't even care enough about us to hate us, do you?

In Hollywood, no one knows anything.

I mean course you want a change, we want a change, but if a change ain't godsdamn coming, then the next thing I wish is that I didn't care.

My father passed me. He looked briefly at me as you might at a stump or a broken machine or anything that's specific only in that it's in your way, to walk around it as my father did me.

WHEN LIFE OFFERS US a "this or that" choice, we should have the gall to ask whether the right answer might be "both.

Ambiguity does, too. In times of change, you may not know what options are available. And this uncertainty leads to decision paralysis

Mary leaned back, exhaled, and watched her smoke rise. 'What sort of man do you want anyway?' "Tall. Funny. Never came top of his class or pulled the wings off bees." "Yes, but I mean really? When all of this is over, and assuming we win -" ... Hilda snorted. "(I) just want a tall man and a stiff drink. You could even swap the adjectives.