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“And I can't be running back and fourth forever between grief and high delight.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observationâ€� the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the "impossible," come true.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up

“In these times I don't, in a manner of speaking, know what I want; perhaps I don't want what I know and want what I don't know.”
― Marsilio Ficino, The Letters of Marsilio Ficino, Vol. 3

“To love is to think.
And I almost forget to feel only from thinking about her.
I don’t know what I want at all, even from her, and I don’t think about anything but her.
I have a great animated distraction.
When I want to meet her,
I almost feel like not meeting her,
So I don’t have to leave her afterwards.
And I prefer thinking about her, because it’s like I’m afraid of her.
I don’t know what I want at all, and I don’t want to know what I want. All I want to do is think about her.
I’m asking nothing of nobody, not even her, except to think.”
― Alberto Caeiro, O Pastor Amoroso

“He feels ambivalent about this, as if it’s disloyal of him, because maybe he’s enjoying how she looks or some physical aspect of her closeness. He’s not sure what friends are allowed to enjoy about each other.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“What am I doing? Tearing myself. My usual occupation at most times.”
― Charles Dickens

“Strangman shrugged theatrically. "It might," he repeated with great emphasis. "Let's admit that. It makes it more interesting—particularly for Kerans. 'Did I or did I not try to kill myself?' One of the few existential absolutes, far more significant than 'To be or not to be?', which merely underlines the uncertainty of the suicide, rather than the eternal ambivalence of his victim." He smiled down patronisingly at Kerans as the latter sat quietly in his chair, sipping at the drink Beatrice had brought him. "Kerans, I envy you the task of finding out—if you can.”
― J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World

“There may be hostility and ambivalence, there may even be no responses and those are the worst because it means people do not care. Yet all of these are part of the parcel of land that we call human experience and spirituality. The deep lows and pinnacled heights as well as the wonderful things in what one priest called the lowlands of mundania. This book is not for you if you are looking for hatred on atheists, religionists or just looking for reasons to justify yourself.”
― Leviak B. Kelly, Religion: The Ultimate STD: Living a Spiritual Life without Dogmatics or Cultural Destruction

“The brevity of our lives breeds a kind of temporal parochialism—an ignorance of or an indifference to those planetary gears which turn more slowly than our own.”
― Kathryn Schulz

“The mental mist of ambiguity and the fog of ambivalence hamper human existence.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“A pensive personality and ambivalent attitude towards power and money can cause other people to take a high production or creative person for granted.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“In starlit nights I saw you,
So cruelly you kissed me.
Your lips a magic world,
Your sky all hung with jewels.
The killing moon
Will come too soon.

- The Killing Moon”
― Echo and the Bunnymen, Echo and the Bunnymen: [collection 1980-1987]

“He felt himself flung back on all the ugly uncertainties from which he thought he had cast loose forever. After all, what did he know of her life? Only as much as she had chosen to show him, and measured by the world's estimate, how little that was!”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“It has never been very easy for me to live, though I am always very happy—maybe because I want so much to be happy. I like so much to live and I hate the idea of dying one day. And then I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life, I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, and to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish... You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, A Transatlantic Love Affair: Letters to Nelson Algren

“Don Bradman will bat no more against England, and two contrary feelings dispute within us: relief, that our bowlers will no longer be oppressed by this phenomenon; regret, that a miracle has been removed from among us. So must ancient Italy have felt when she heard of the death of Hannibal.”
― R.C. Robertson-Glasgow

“nevermore will i lie in the wake of your ambivalence”
― A.P. Sweet, The Abattoir of Silence

“The tension between not being let in and not being let go fixes us. Especially when it's the not-being-let-in that won't let you go. You're held at the threshold. You're turned away, but you can't turn away.”
― Randon Billings Noble, Be with Me Always: Essays

“In the most basic of situations-- when we know what we are doing, when we are engaged with the familiar-- these fundamental tendencies suffice. Our actual situations, however, are almost always more complex. If things or situations were straightforwardly or simply positive or negative, good or bad, we would not have to make judgements regarding them, would not have to think about our behavior, and how and when it should be modified-- indeed, would not have to think at all. We are faced, however, with the constant problem of ambivalence in meaning, which is to say that a thing or situation might be bad and good simultaneously (or good in two conflicting manners; or bad, in two conflicting manners).”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief

“Doesn’t everyone have at least two opposing natures warring inside them?”
― Carol Edgarian, Vera

“Command of the self is a goal of every person, because in absence of a personal identity and deprived of the ability to direct our actions we lack the means purposefully to interact with the external environment. Lacking self-control and deprived of the ability intentionally to engage with the world places us in a precarious position. Demonstrating self-doubt, personal ambivalence, and hesitation when action is called for endangers us, subjecting us to the capriciousness of the world filled with anarchy, chaos, and violence.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“And yet I feel an uncanny kinship to Moses as the Rabbis imagine him in that story, as I suppose that the Rabbis intended I should. Theirs was a system that made a virtue of ambivalence and built uncertainty into bedrock assertions of faith. No wonder fundamentalists and fascists have hated it so. And why I feel drawn towards it even now and, in the face of everything, find myself oddly determined to carry my own flawed version away from the slope of Sinai where, according to tradition, my soul stood at the time of the original revelation.”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey between Worlds

“To be free is to escape restraint. Style becomes manner, introspection breeds narcissism, asserting the self leads to exhibition. Fame decays into celebrity, public presence into publicity, public judgement is a noise in the street. The individual as subject becomes an ego. Yet this egotism, liberated by its illegitimacy from the discipline of family and community, makes a display of what unrestrained talent can attain - inviting others, whatever their birth or position, to do the same. If individualism is a demonic power, it is also a force for democracy.”
― Brian P. Copenhaver, Magic and the Dignity of Man: Pico della Mirandola and His Oration in Modern Memory

“Regarded everywhere as an absolute advance of the human race, and with the seal set on it by human rights, liberation starts out from the idea of a natural predestination to be free: being 'liberated' absolves the human being of an original evil, restores a happy purpose and a natural vocation to him.
It is our salvation, the true baptismal sacrament of modern, democratic man.
Now, this is a utopia.
This impulse to resolve the ambivalence of good and evil and jump over one's shadow into absolute positivity is a utopia.
The ambivalence is definitive, and the things liberated are liberated in total ambivalence.
You cannot liberate good without liberating evil. Sometimes evil even quicker than good, as part of the same movement.
At any rate, what we have here is a deregulation of both.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact

“Both God and the Devil are in the detailsâ€�”
― D. Michael Quinn, Chosen Path: A Memoir

“Ambivalence and ambiguity aren't necessarily signs of weakness or sins of indecision. They can be apt responses to events we don't yet understand, with outcomes we can't predict.
But they don't make for bold sentences or tidy talking points.”
― Frank Bruni, The Age of Grievance

“They were mistaken if they thought he did not kill her because he loved her too much. At that moment Nacib did not love her. He did not hate her either. He beat her mechanically, as if to relax his nerves from the tension of suffering. He was empty like a vase without a flower. He felt a pain in his heart as if someone were slowly pushing a dagger into it. He felt neither hate nor love. Just pain" (366).”
― Jorge Amado

“He had to pause for his usual misgivings.”
― Paul C. Nagel, John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, a Private Life

“Luther's personality as well as his teachings shows ambivalence toward authority. On the one hand he is overawed by authority—that of a worldly authority and that of a tyrannical God—and on the other hand he rebels against authority—that of the Church. He shows the same ambivalence in his attitude toward the masses. As far as they rebel within the limits he has set he is with them. But when they attack the authorities he approves of, an intense hatred and contempt for the masses comes to the fore. […] we shall show that this simultaneous love for authority and the hatred against those who are powerless are typical traits of the "authoritarian character.”
― Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom

“I can miss my dad and hate him at the same time. I can be worried about this book and torn up about my family and sick over the house I'm living in, and still look at lake Michigan and feel overwhelmed by how big it is. I spent all last summer thinking I'd never be happy again, and now, a year later, I still feel sick and worried and angry, but at moments, I'm so happy. Bad things don't dig down through your life until the pit's so deep that nothing good will ever be big enough to make you happy again. No matter how much shit, there will always be wildflowers. There will always be Pete's and Maggies and rainstorms in forests and sun on waves.”
― Emily Henry, Beach Read

“In ambivalence, we want and we don’t want what we want. Or we want parts but not wholes and resent the added freight. Or we’re averse to what we’re attached to but can perform neither a reconciliation nor a cleavage. It can be a dramatic state but it’s also likely to be a mess of loose live wires that it’s hard to put a finger on. This complex of intensity within ambivalence extends from disrespect of populations as in misogyny and racism to scenes of love and political obsession. For any important object becomes a source of roiling, confused ideation about who’s powerful and who’s not, and what the potentials are for cohabitations of the world. Sometimes the internal clash comes from the inconvenience paradox of dependency itself, of needing people or a situation and hating to have that need. Then, being in relation, and forging attachments within it, both threatens and relieves us from our sovereign fantasies and states.”
― Lauren Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People