Ambivalence Quotes

• Ambivalence is a wonderful tune to dance to. It has a rhythm all its own.

  Erica Jong

  Inspirational, Dance, Tunes

  FaceBook post by Erica Jong from May 06, 2015

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• Modern science knows much about such conflicts. We call the mental state that engenders it "ambivalence": a collision between thought and feeling.

  David Seabury

  Feelings, Conflict, Modern

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• The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.

  Paul de Man

  Nature, Writing, Coincidence

  Paul de Man (2013). “Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism”, p.152, Routledge

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• It seems we are capable of immense love and loyalty, and as capable of deceit and atrocity. It's probably this shocking ambivalence that makes us unique.

  John Scott

  Loyalty, Unique, Hype

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• I've always been fascinated by the operation of memory - the way in which it is not linear but fragmented, and its ambivalence.

  Penelope Lively

  Memories, Way, Linear

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• It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness

  Adrienne Rich

  Suffering, Nerves, Resentment

  Adrienne Rich (1976). “Of woman born motherhood as experience and institution”

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• Whatever ambivalence I felt about my own career, Frankie more than made up for it with his ambition and tenacity.

  Annette Funicello

  Ambition, Careers, Tenacity

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• My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness. Sometimes I seem to myself, in my feelings toward these tiny guiltless beings, a monster of selfishness and intolerance.

  Adrienne Rich

  Children, Feelings, Suffering

  Adrienne Rich (1976). “Of woman born motherhood as experience and institution”

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• Fiction just has a lot more room for ambivalence and internal conflict, contradiction, and for me that sums up so much of what people felt after 9/11 - confusion even. And I think that's hard to capture in journalism.

  Amy Waldman

  Thinking, People, Confusion

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• For a mother the project of raising a boy is the most fulfilling project she can hope for. She can watch him, as a child, play the games she was not allowed to play; she can invest in him her ideas, aspirations, ambitions, and values - or whatever she has left of them; she can watch her son, who came from her flesh and whose life was sustained by her work and devotion, embody her in the world. So while the project of raising a boy is fraught with ambivalence and leads inevitably to bitterness, it is the only project that allows a woman to be - to be through her son, to live through her son.

  Andrea Dworkin

  Family, Mother, Children

  "Our Blood". Book by Andrea Dworkin, 1976.

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• Ambivalence is like carbon monoxide - undetectable yet deadly.

  Cherie Carter-Scott

  Indecision, Carbon

  Cherie Carter-Scott (2010). “If Success Is A Game, These Are The Rules”, p.16, Random House

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• They say the definition of ambivalence is watching your mother-in-law drive over a cliff in your new Cadillac.

  David Mamet

  Mother, Law, Cadillacs

  "Home is the hunter". www.theguardian.com. February 18, 2000.

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• We need to be ambivalent - in the essay, and in life too. Ambivalence - having mixed feelings, entertaining contradiction, living with fluctuation - is a widened embrace. It's about the coexistence of things, and in that light, we have no choice in the matter.

  Charles D'Ambrosio

  Choices, Feelings, Contradiction

  "Loitering: A Conversation with Essayist and Author Charles D'Ambrosio". Interview With Chris Schluep, www.amazonbookreview.com. February 3, 2016.

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• I think ethical ambivalence is a kind of innoculation, a way of excusing yourself in advance for something you actually want to do. No offense.

  Jennifer Egan

  Thinking, Want, Way

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• Horizontality is a desire to give up, to sleep. Verticality is an attempt to escape. Hanging and floating are states of ambivalence.

  Louise Bourgeois

  Giving Up, Sleep, Desire

  Louise Bourgeois, John Cheim (1988). “Louise Bourgeois: Drawings”

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• Men are confused. They're conflicted. They want a woman who's their intellectual equal, but they're afraid of women like that. They want a woman they can dominate, but then they hate her for being weak. It's an ambivalence that goes back to a man's relationship with his mother. Source of his life, center of his universe, object of both his fear and his love.

  Diane Frolov

  Mother, Hate, Confused

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• Let us consider the polarity of love and hate.... Now, clinical observation shows not only that love is with unexpected regularityaccompanied by hate (ambivalence), and not only that in human relationships hate is frequently a forerunner of love, but also that in many circumstances hate changes into love and love into hate.

  Sigmund Freud

  Love, Hate, Unexpected

  Sigmund Freud (1952). “Major Works”

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• Since time out of mind, a considered act of heroism has been the cure for stultifying ambivalence.

  Clarissa Pinkola Estes

  Mind, Heroism, Cures

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

  Tony Campolo

  Religious, Government, Leader

  "Will Faith-Based Programs Go Sour on Obama?" by Tony Campolo, www.huffingtonpost.com. April 9, 2009.

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• Beneath the surface of our daily life, in the personal history of many of us, there runs a continuous controversy between an Ego that affirms and an Ego that denies.

  Beatrice Webb

  Running, Ego, Personal History

  Beatrice Webb, Beatrice Potter Webb (1979). “My Apprenticeship”, p.43, Cambridge University Press

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• I've always had a lot of ambivalence about fame and celebrity.

  Jane Pauley

  Fame

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• Abstract is not a style. I simply want to make a surface work. This is just a use of space and form: it's an ambivalence of forms and space.

  Joan Mitchell

  Space, Style, Use

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• The base of artistic pursuit is ambivalence and complexity. And that's what I try to do.

  Fernando Perez

  Trying, Artistic, Pursuit

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• For the only therapy is life. The patient must learn to live, to live with his split, his conflict, his ambivalence, which no therapy can take away, for if it could, it would take with it the actual spring of life.

  Otto Rank

  Spring, Splits, Patient

  Otto Rank (1936). “Will therapy: an analysis of the therapeutic process in terms of relationship”

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• We don't do ambivalence well in America. We do courage of our convictions. We do might makes right. Ambivalence is French. Certainty is American.

  Anna Quindlen

  America, Might, Conviction

  Anna Quindlen (2010). “Thinking Out Loud: On the Personal, the Political, the Public and the Private”, p.170, Ballantine Books

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