Quotes About Ambivalence

Honestly, man, I'm not somebody who wants the celebrity. I could really care less about that stuff. I know everyone says it, but I get overwhelmed by it all sometimes.

You are always, always overwhelmed by positive response because you know it can go either way.

I'm afraid I talk a lot, too much, perhaps. I should have been a lawyer or a college professor or a windy politician, though I'm glad I am not any of these.

Well, it's either kiss me or kill me, that's how I see it.

Try to imagine," one commentator observed, "the ambivalent anxieties of a freewheeling people with one foot in manure and the other in the telegraph office.

From the beginning, there have been some religious leaders who greeted the funding of faith-based social services by government with ambivalence.

I think Farmer taps into a universal anxiety and also into a fundamental place in some troubled consciences, into what he calls "ambivalence," the often unacknowledged uneasiness that some of the fortunate feel about their place in the world, the thing he once told me he designed his life to avoid.

When faced with remarkability, she wasn't sure she trusted it.

I was a kid, and I wasn't even sure if I wanted to play the drums, you know? All I wanted to do was skateboard, but I was still learning and taking it in, so it was good.

I miss those days, don't you? I mean, except for the terrible parts.

Yo escribo este manifiesto para mostrar que pueden ejecutarse juntas las acciones opuestas, en una sola y fresca respiración; yo estoy en contra de la acción; a favor de la continua contradicción, y también de la afirmación, no estoy ni a favor ni en contra y no lo explico porque odio el sentido común.

Beyond his sisters, lit by the pale moonlight, Smolder's eyes were shining. He was nothing but happy to see his mother dead. But

But there was never any knowing or any certitude; the time to come always had more than one possible direction.

If reports about a candidate talk about how something "raises questions," creates "shadows," or anything similar, be aware that these are all too often weasel words used to create the impression of wrongdoing out of thin air.

People want to change everything and, at the same time, want it all to remain the same.

She was neither happy nor unhappy, and that was why she couldn't go on.

There were two things that prevent us from achieving our dreams: believing them to be impossible or seeing those dreams made possible by some sudden turn of the wheel of fortune, when you least expected it. [...] People want to change everything and, at the same time, want it all to remain the same

We can't be certain who the villains are cuz everyone's so pretty, but the after party's sure to be the wing-ding as it moves into your city.

Margaret's throat had some swollen thing in it. Fog blurred everything but the charging red face. An unvoiced whimper shook her breast. She wanted to run to him as to a lover. She wanted to run from him as from a ravisher. She stood very still in her doorway, smiling demurely with dry, hot mouth.

How lame this is, how small, terrible. Or maybe it is beautiful. I can't decide if what I am doing is beautiful and noble and right, or small and disgusting.

I was always either so unreasonably and pointlessly happy that no one place could seem to contain me, or so melancholy, so sick and silly with sadness that there was no place I could stomach the thought of entering. I hated it here. And I have never been as happy as when I was here. And these two things together confront me with the beak and claws of the True.

Like many Americans of his generation in this awkwardest of post-Imperial decades, an age suspended between exhaustion and replenishment, between input too ordinary to process and input too intense to bear, Sternberg is deeply ambivalent about being embodied; an informing fear that, were he really just an organism, he'd be nothing more than an ism of his organs.

I hated it here. And I have never been as happy as when I was here. And these two things together confront me with the beak and claws of the True.

The weird thing is that I cared about him at the same time I found him gross. He grossed me out... And that I was so deep in my problem that I couldn't accept real, genuine, nonsexual or nonromantic or non-prettiness-type interest in me even if it was offered to me.