Quotes About Ambivalence

it's the growing sense of dissatisfaction that keeps one awake at night. The brain refusing to let go of the alternative lives that might have been. It isn't the strong sleepers who sleep around.

The sweetness of the blackberries revealed itself incompletely, changing and deepening until it dissolved from the back of the tongue with the maddening hint of a greater remainder. He was left with a question he could not phrase, and a galaxy of tiny seeds that tantalized the tongue.

Regret?" Vivian raises her shoulders in a shrug. "I'm not sure what good it is to regret.

Like Janus, the press has presented two faces: one detrimental and one advantageous.

They say one thing and another thing and both at once;

I find it most remarkable that we who are so intimately involved in the battle between good and evil are even more involved with the shades of gray in between them.

When I got the Nobel Prize I said to myself that it had made me neither smarter nor more stupid.

It was difficult to understand him. On the one hand he pandered even to the most unimportant things while on the other he was excessive and unfeeling. He might show the most fatherly concern for a female secretary who had stabbed her toe but be utterly ice-cold when issuing orders which set thousands to their deaths.

The men look at Aunt Mia the way I might look at a hot fudge sundae in the hours between lunch and dinner. You know, when you're not sure if it's a good idea to go ahead -- you're interested beyond a shadow of a doubt, but you wonder if it might turn out to be a little too much for you. Men seem to realize that Aunt Mia's already making the most of herself.

the nice bits of them can never make up for the offensively crappy parts. I

How can something be so wonderful and yet so disappointing at the same time?

it is a vice to spend years and centuries saying of progress, 'I should like it, but I do not want it.

The African American's relationship to Africa has long been ambivalent, at least since the early nineteenth century, when 3 000 black men crowded into Bishop Richard Allen's African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia to protest noisily a plan to recolonize free blacks in Africa.

I'll never forget how the depression and loneliness felt good and bad at the same time. Still does.

I'll never forget how the depression and loneliness felt good and bad at the same time. Still does.

She felt as though everything were beginning to be double in her soul, just as objects sometimes appear double to over-tired eyes. She hardly knew at times what it was she feared, and what she hoped for. Whether she feared or desired what had happened, or what was going to happen, and exactly what she longed for, she could not have said.

Vrea s? muÈ™te din fructul amar, dar f?r? s?-i guste am?reala. S? lucrezi în lume, dar s? nu simÈ›i nici un fel de dragoste pentru lume.

I hate and detest Sicily in so far as I love it, and in so far as it does not respond to the kind of love I would like to have for it.

He wasn't surprised. He was used to this anticlimactic feeling, where by the time you've done all the work to get something you don't even want it anymore.

In our world no one ever knows what to do, and everyone's just as clueless and full of crap as everyone else, and you have to figure it all out by yourself. And even after you've figured it out and done it, you'll never know whether you were right or wrong. You'll never know if you put the ring in the right volcano, or if things might have gone better if you hadn't.

But being in the middle of it, it wasn't that obvious.

Most of the students, and probably the faculty, were ambivalent about the whole idea of Disciplines. They were socially divisive, the theory behind them was weak, and everybody ended up studying pretty much the same curriculum anyway, so what was the point? But it was traditional for every student to have one, so a Discipline every student would have. Alice called it her magic bat mitzvah.

Neither a child nor an adult, neither innocent nor wise. Perhaps that is what a monster is.

He was used to this anticlimactic feeling, where by the time you've done all the work to get something you don't even want it anymore.