Ambivalence Quotes - Page 2

• 'The Simpsons' is about alienation and the ambivalence of living with a family who you love but who drive you completely crazy.

  Matt Groening

  Crazy, Alienation

  "Matt Groening, Grabbing for Laughs in the Darkness". "Morning Edition" with Steve Inskeep, www.npr.org. July 26, 2007.

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• The struggle to emerge out of the past, clean of memories; the inadequacy of our hearts to cut life into separate and final portions; the pain of this constant ambivalence and interrelation of emotions; the hunger for frontiers against which we might learn as upon closed doors before we proceed forward; the struggle against diffusion, new beginnings, against finality in acts without finality or end, in our cursedly repercussive being.

  Anais Nin

  Pain, Memories, Struggle

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• Prudence is not hesitation, procrastination, or moderation. It is not driving in the middle of the road. It is not the way of ambivalence, indecision, or safety.

  John Ortberg

  Procrastination, Safety, Way

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• Nothing is so threatening to conventional values as a man who does not want to work or does not want to work at a challenging job,and most people are disturbed if a man in a well- paying job indicates ambivalence or dislike toward it.

  Alice S Rossi

  Jobs, Men, People

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• Caution is an important quality in a leader, but it has to be caution followed by decision. Caution followed by ambivalence can be a weakness.

  Leon Panetta

  Decision, Leader, Important

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• 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, try, and trust again, and eventually you'll feel your mind change its focus to a new level of understanding.

  Martha Beck

  Focus, Decision, Understanding

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• I am happy to accept that badge of ambivalence if that means some progress in dismantling this false opposition: writers boldly using their privileges of free speech in the morally superior West versus pathetic wimps in repressive countries we don't like.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Country, Mean, Progress

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I was toying with the idea of ambivalence a lot. It's something I work on, not being so invested in outcomes and being more engaged in the process of my life.

  Lissie

  Ideas, Outcomes, Process

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Man-hating is everywhere, but everywhere it is twisted and transformed, disguised, tranquilized, and qualified. It coexists, never peacefully, with the love, desire, respect, and need women also feel for men. Always man-hating is shadowed by its milder, more diplomatic and doubtful twin, ambivalence.

  Judith Levine

  Hate, Men, Feminist

  Judith Levine (1993). “My Enemy, My Love: Women, Men, and the Dilemmas of Gender”, Anchor Books

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• My love stories are about people who are reluctant to actualize what they so desperately want. They are timid, cautious, but eventually they dare to speak. My characters are not only hesitant; they are ambivalent about which way their libido flows: toward men or women? They are fluid in their sexuality, and this ambivalence says more about how we think about sex today than, say, Tinder. And this is a truly modern idea: Most of us don't know who we are sexually.

  André Aciman

  Character, Men, Thinking

  Source: www.glamour.com

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• Jokes are great capsules of information. I think they should never be censored. They often are offensive - and we're offended by different things - but I believe deeply in what Freud wrote of their relationship to the unconscious, which is that jokes come to help us. We laugh so as to dispense with, or to express, some ambivalence or discomfort with the things around us. That's what laughing is: a release.

  Lynne Tillman

  Believe, Thinking, Laughing

  Interview with James Yeh, believermag.com. January 1, 2018.

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• The illness has only made certain ambivalences I'd always been conscious of that much more acute. Life versus Death, the absolute randomness of one's position, privilege, and place, the lot one draws, and so on. It has made previously suspicious-seeming clichés seem more tolerable. Love may not be all you need, but it is certainly a necessity. My desire to survive has been exponentially magnified by the fact that there is someone intimately tangled up in me who would be left alone with the world.

  Ben Doller

  Tangled, Desire, World

  Source: therumpus.net

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• My experience is that lots of people go to church, sing the songs, tell the story, etc but have profound ambivalence about God.

  Rob Bell

  Song, Profound, People

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• I love the sort of ambivalence of this, the ambiguity of something - being, for instance, in a quite busy Mexican restaurant with one of these very gentle tracks playing I remember as being particularly nice.

  Brian Eno

  Nice, Track, Mexican

  Interview with Mark Richardson, pitchfork.com. November 1, 2010.

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• I felt a lot of ambivalence about going back to graduate school for a second MFA. The impulse was really the opposite from what it had been more than a decade before: I wanted to interrupt a career.

  Garth Greenwell

  School, Opposites, Careers

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Ambivalence reaches the level of schizophrenia in our treatment of violence among the young. Parents do not encourage violence, but neither do they take up arms against the industries which encourage it. Parents hide their eyes from the books and comics, slasher films, videos and lyrics which form the texture of an adolescent culture. While all successful societies have inhibited instinct, ours encourages it. Or at least we profess ourselves powerless to interfere with it.

  C. Sommerville

  Book, Eye, Successful

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• More than its utilitarian and technocratic transparency, it is the opaque ambivalence of its oddities that makes the city livable.

  Michel de Certeau

  Oddities, Cities, Opaque

  Michel de Certeau, Pierre Mayol (1998). “The Practice of Everyday Life: Living and cooking. Volume 2”, p.134, U of Minnesota Press

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• History's villains are more easily recognized in retrospect. In an article published in 1935 and reprinted in 1937, Winston Churchill expressed a curious ambivalence towards the German chancellor prior to the outbreak of war: We cannot tell whether Hitler will be the man who will once again let loose upon the world another war in which civilization will irretrievably succumb, or whether he will go down in history as the man who restored honour and peace of mind to the great Germanic nation. . . .

  Winston Churchill

  War, Men, Civilization

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• Mothers are not the nameless, faceless stereotypes who appear once a year on a greeting card with their virtues set to prose, but women who have been dealt a hand for life and play each card one at a time the best way they know how. No mother is all good or all bad, all laughing or all serious, all loving or all angry. Ambivalence rushes through their veins.

  Erma Bombeck

  Mother, Hands, Years

  "Motherhood: The Second Oldest Profession".

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• The less obvious hurdle is that of preparing parents emotionally and putting forward realistic images of parenthood and motherhood. There also needs to be some sort of acknowledgement that not everyone should parent - when parenting is a given, it's not fully considered or thought out, and it gives way too easily to parental ambivalence and unhappiness.

  Jessica Valenti

  Motherhood, Giving, Parent

  Jessica Valenti (2012). “Why Have Kids?: A New Mom Explores the Truth about Parenting and Happiness”, p.107, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Some people have human muses - mine is a city. I feel a startling ambivalence towards London, but for better or worse my work has come utterly to depend upon it.

  Will Self

  Cities, People, London

  "In the beginning" by Will Self, www.theguardian.com. June 16, 2007.

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• Indeed, it is that ambiguity and ambivalence which often is so puzzling in women

  Lillian B. Rubin

  Women, Often Is, Ambiguity

  Lillian B. Rubin (1981). “Women of a certain age: the midlife search for self”, Harpercollins

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• The public's continuing ambivalence about cultural matters is all the more striking given that the political conversation on these issues has for 30 years been dominated by an aggressive, radical right-wing insurgency that has achieved an influence far out of proportion to its numbers. Its potent secret weapon has been the guilt and anxiety about desire that inform the character of Americans regardless of ideology; appealing to those largely unconscious emotions, the right has disarmed, intimidated, paralyzed its opposition.

  Ellen Willis

  Character, Years, Wings

  "Escape from Freedom". "Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination", Vol 1, No 2, 2006.

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• I think the proper attitude toward fighting sports is one of ambivalence. You can be drawn to them, but you should also be repelled by them.

  Jonathan Gottschall

  Sports, Attitude, Fighting

  "A Talk With The Savage English Professor". Interview with Sam Harris, www.thedailybeast.com. March 5, 2015.

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• When divorces meant marriage no longer provided security for a lifetime, women adjusted by focusing on careers as empowerment. But when the sacrifice of a career met the sacrifices in a career, the fantasy of a career became the reality of trade-offs. Women developed career ambivalence.

  Warren Farrell

  Divorce, Sacrifice, Reality

  "Why Men Are the Way They Are". Book by Warren Farrell, 1986.

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