Top 76 Quotes About Ambivalent
#1. Glances were exchanged around the table. There were some uneasy winces, a couple of ambivalent shrugs, a few determined nods, and one delighted giggle (but only because Duncan had spotted another funny caterpillar).
Christopher Healy
#2. Dad scowls. "Phen." He says the name like it's a swear word. "Disgusting, cowardly creatures, the ambivalent. Worse than the fallen, in many ways." His eyes are so fierce it's a tad scary. "They have no conviction at all.
Cynthia Hand
#3. The victim is always morally superior to the master; that is the victim's ambivalent triumph. That is why there have been so few notoriously wicked women in comparison to the number of notoriously wicked men; our victim status ensures that we rarely have the opportunity.
Angela Carter
#4. If you're feeling intransigently ambivalent, it might pay to formally accept what's already happening - that is, decide not to decide.
Martha Beck
#6. I find it ironic that someone so ambivalent about living fights so hard to survive.
Denise Grover Swank
#7. Fashion is as profound and critical a part of the social life of man as sex, and is made up of the same ambivalent mixture of irresistible urges and inevitable taboos.
Rene Konig
#8. I'm very ambivalent in my feelings about marriage. I think it promises a lot to people - sort of like saying, once you get married you are on the highway to heaven, and quite often it isn't that. I think marriage has always been based on a combination of religious and legal reasons.
Mick Jagger
#9. My own sense of the world is that very little is absolute or black and white or easily understood. I suppose in all my writing I'm trying to cast the reader into this spiritually ambivalent dream world, which hopefully mirrors more honestly the complex reality we find ourselves in.
Andre Dubus
#10. I've never been socially outgoing, but I suspect I've gotten more and more ambivalent about making new friends. I'm irritated by how-do-you-do chit-chat, but that's how new relationships usually begin.
Ariel Gore
#11. Nothing abstruse or ambivalent about it, not a speck of the metaphoric or the symbolic.
Haruki Murakami
#12. Pro-choice supporters are often heard using the cool language of the courts and the vocabulary of rights. Americans who are deeply ambivalent about abortion often miss the sound of caring.
Ellen Goodman
#13. I'm Ambivalent. In fact that's my new favorite word.
Do you know what it means ?
I don't care.
Susanna Kaysen
#14. When you're dealing with an ambivalent relationship, you're constantly on guard, grappling with questions of trust.
Adam Grant
#15. America is a nation fundamentally ambivalent about its children, often afraid of its children, and frequently punitive toward its children.
Letty Cottin Pogrebin
#16. The American nation today is infantile so much as adolescent - that is ambivalent in its twin desire for both authoritarian structure and the end of parental hegemony
David Foster Wallace
#17. His version of 'real' love isn't sufficient for me, I don't think anyone should settle for so little. It wasn't love - not in the true sense. On my part, it was neediness, insecurity, dependence, habit - desperate to feel loved by a man who was often ambivalent towards me.
Freya North
#18. The biggest problem that women have is being ambivalent about their own power, ... We should be comfortable with the idea of wielding power. We shouldn't feel that it detracts from our femininity.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#19. He used to sit on my lap. I was sort of ambivalent about that. He was surviving any way he could.
Marion Zimmer Bradley
#20. I think the world is ambivalent about feminism. So I can't blame college students. I think they're reflecting the greater culture's attitude toward feminism. So what I can do is, in ways that are appropriate, advocate for feminism and help the students learn what feminism is about.
Roxane Gay
#21. God is erratic, sometimes vindictive, sometimes merciful. The people I was taught were heroes - Jacob or Moses or David - were ambivalent figures, or worse. But that messiness was joyful, and challenging. I loved having a Bible that I could argue with.
David Plotz
#22. He [Tony Blair] was always ambivalent about the [Rupert] Murdoch papers. But he gave other papers the chance to believe it was just about The Independent. And that was wrong.
Alastair Campbell
#23. I'd rather make an interesting film that gets people talking, that maybe some people hate, than make the kind of 'entertaining' film that everyone feels ambivalent about.
Emily Browning
#25. Americans have always had an ambivalent attitude toward intelligence. When they feel threatened, they want a lot of it, and when they don't, they regard the whole thing as somewhat immoral.
Vernon A. Walters
#26. When you 'make good,' you find out who your real friends are. You find out pretty quick. And it's a very ambivalent feeling, because you're, like, happy you found out that people are [jerkfaces], but you're kinda sad because you think, 'Wow, I wasted so much time being this person's friend.'
Greg Camp
#27. The good psychologist is ambivalent about people, because he knows well their treacherous nature, their potential for destruction, delusion and deceit.
Noam Shpancer
#28. It is only when parental feelings are ineffective or too ambivalent or when the mother's emotions are temporarily engaged elsewhere that children feel lost.
Anna Freud
#29. All along I've had an ambivalent relationship to photography - but as to whether I thought it an art form, or a craft, or a technique, well, I've always been taken with Henry Geldzahler's answer to that question when he said, I thought it was a hobby.
David Hockney
#30. I think it's still difficult to write about motherhood and anxiety, that talking about not wanting to be a mother or feeling ambivalent about motherhood makes people uneasy. The ambivalent mother is certainly much more interesting.
Laurie Foos
#31. Their flat, unreadable faces showed no signs of youth or age, as if their relationship with time was somehow ambivalent; and
Stephen R. Donaldson
#32. The American public is somewhat ambivalent about what they expect out of thenational forest.
Ralph Regula
#33. This aim was frankly admitted in the Newspeak word duckspeak, meaning "to quack like a duck." Like various other words in the B vocabulary, duckspeak was ambivalent in meaning. Provided
George Orwell
#34. religious rituals cast an aura of sacrality on bread by putting it in liminal contact with the celestial sphere. The meshing of the sacred with the profane endowed bread with a plethora of superimposed, ambivalent, and overcharged meanings, which the regime fully exploited.
Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi
#35. Gollum was so interesting to me because he's morally ambivalent, and I love the notion of a quest that is to lose something. Not to gain, but to get rid of something.
Andy Serkis
#36. Skilled workers historically have been ambivalent toward automation, knowing that the bodies it would augment or replace were theoccasion for both their pain and their power.
Shoshana Zuboff
#37. 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
#38. ... it was but one of the things that made friendship with me an ambivalent enterprise.
Pat Conroy
#39. I'm still ambivalent about Hollywood. I think that's why I made 'Star 80.' To deal with the ambivalence. I really wanted to succeed Gene Kelly, and I thought it was a fair bet.
Bob Fosse
#40. Children who experience anxious or ambivalent attachments to their primary caregivers may "fall in love" too easily, seeking extreme closeness right off the bat and reacting intensely to any suggestion of abandonment.
Adam Cash
#41. Young men list music as their focus and means of identity
before sport, before TV, before cinema
while women cite fashion as most important, with music an ambivalent second.
Lucy O'Brien
#42. When we talk about communities, we seldom discuss the margins. But for every person nestled comfortably in the bosom of a community, there is someone else on the outskirts, feeling ambivalent. Ambiguous. Excluded. Unwilling or unable to come more fully into the fold.
Adam Mansbach
#43. In the U.S. I think there are really two reasons we should pursue energy policy. One is climate change, and the second is this notion that the oil market is cartel-ized by people, some of whom are friendly, some of whom are not, some of whom are in a more ambivalent position to us.
Brad Carson
#44. I always seem to be cast as slightly wan, ethereal, troubled intellectuals or physically ambivalent bad lovers. But I'm here to tell you I'm quite the opposite in real life. In fact I'm a f**king fantastic lover.
Benedict Cumberbatch
#45. Plenty of people who survive tragedies end up ambivalent about danger
frightened by it, yet strangely drawn to it.
Keith Ablow
#46. Yeah, well call me unpatriotic, but I see don't see the cheerleader thing. Cheer isn't sexy. Dark is sexy. Ambivalent is sexy. Deeper-than-it-looks-at-first-glance is sexy.
John Green
#47. I'm not doubtful that I am doing what I should be doing - writing for theater - and that I'm doing it in a way no one else does it. Whether anyone else is paying attention or anyone else cares, I'm still ambivalent about that. It's still an open question.
Jason Robert Brown
#48. Having a child, I thought, was something you should actively want, crave, even. It was not a venture for the ambivalent or passionless.
Hanya Yanagihara
#49. When asked at age 7 whether he had ambivalent feelings about girls. No, I hate 'em!
Colin Johnson
#50. It is perverse that a nation so rich should neglect its children so shamefully. Our attitude toward them is cruelly ambivalent. Weare sentimental about children but in our actions do not value them. We say we love them but give them little honor.
Richard Stolley
#51. Golf has an ambivalent relationship with the environment. On one hand, it's a great preserver of open spaces. Golf doesn't pave the world - it helps to green the world. But the downside is, it uses a lot of fertilizer, pesticides and water.
Thomas Friedman
#52. I always tell people this when they're looking for an agent - they should love your work. You are entitled to work with someone who believes in you. Why do business with someone who is ambivalent about you and your art?
Jami Attenberg
#53. This wasn't about knowledge but about the aura knowledge exuded, the places it came from, which were almost all outside the world we lived in now, yet were still within the ambivalent space where all historical objects and ideas reside.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#54. You hated him in the movies! Now you're ambivalent.
Steve Higgins
#55. I worked with fantastic actors, fantastic directors. People I would never otherwise have met. Was I limited? Yes. Did I use it as I could have? No. But I was always ambivalent about Hollywood and what I wanted. And ambivalence in our business is no good for success.
Valeria Golino
#56. Wall Street is at best ambivalent. The size of the accounts is nothing big. How many Wall Street firms do you know that are running after people with $5,000 accounts?
Robert Pozen
#57. We incessantly vacillate between what's behind us and what's before us depending on the current barometer of our courage and the ambivalent nature of our vision.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#58. I prefer to make a film that people have a really intense reaction to than have a film that people feel ambivalent about.
Emily Browning
#59. I was watching MTV and there were girls dancing in suspended cages. That would be an ambivalent situation: "I'm trapped! ... but enjoying the music".
Demetri Martin
#60. We all have ambivalent feelings toward work ... We try to avoid it, and yet we seem to require it for our emotional well-being.
Samuel Florman
#61. Visiting is a pleasure; being visited is usually a mixed or ambivalent joy ... The visitor can always go home; the visitee is already home, trapped like a rat in a drainpipe.
Barbara Holland
#62. I've always been profoundly ambivalent about fame. I think it just eats the reality out of you and it can be intoxicating because I like some of it.
Jane Pauley
#63. If we stop helping people because we're afraid, or ambivalent or whatever, then we lose. Let them do evil. I'll stop them.
Brandon Sanderson
#64. The attitude of the American public toward the external projection of American power has been much more ambivalent. The public supported America's engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Zbigniew Brzezinski
#65. The point I am trying to make is that words are a mysterious, ambiguous, ambivalent, and perfidious phenomenon. They can be rays of light in a realm of darkness ... They can equally be lethal arrows. Worst of all, at times they can be one or the other. They can even be both at once!
Vaclav Havel
#66. Friendship (as the ancients saw) can be a school of virtue; but also (as they did not see) a school of vice. It is ambivalent. It makes good men better and bad men worse.
C.S. Lewis
#67. Being ambivalent doesn't mean that you're a relevatist, that anything goes; it just means that you show the complexity of life. Life is always complex.
Etgar Keret
#68. I'd like to see a much more open Monarchy, myself. I used to think they were completely useless and we should get rid of them. I don't necessarily feel that way anymore. I'm still ambivalent, I still loathe the British class system, and the Royal family are the apex of the British class system.
Helen Mirren
#69. Throughout my life, I have grappled with my own identity, who I am. As a young child, I often felt ambivalent about myself, in fact, confused.
James McGreevey
#70. We all parent the best we can. Being human, we're ambivalent. We want perfection for our babies, but we also need sleep.
Erica Jong
#71. The more ambivalent you are and the more uncertain you are, then you can get something that you cannot anticipate.
Elia Kazan
#72. No matter where you are in your life, whatever set of people you're with, it all still breaks down like high school does. You have your social cliques, you have the people you get along with, the people you don't and the people you're ambivalent about. All of the dynamics are still here.
Colin Hanks
#73. 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.
Henry Louis Gates
#74. I've had some ambivalent feelings about being an actor. I don't know that I've ever been totally and completely comfortable with it.
Don Johnson
#75. nevermore will i lie in the wake of your ambivalence
A.P. Sweet
#76. The mental mist of ambiguity and the fog of ambivalence hamper human existence.
Kilroy J. Oldster
