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Ambivalence Quotes

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Ambivalence Quotes

“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.”

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Book:Beach Read
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“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.”

LifeHappinessSuccessWorkAmbivalenceLust For LifeHobbysOverburdening
Book:A Transatlantic Love Affair: Letters to Nelson Algren
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“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.”

ThinkingLoveTruthEmotionLongingConfusionComplexityWantingPantheismAmbivalenceFallen In LovePaganis
Book:O Pastor Amoroso
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“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.”

CharacterTyrannyContemptAuthoritarianismMartin LutherMassesAmbivalenceProtestantismLutheranism1941
Book:Escape from Freedom
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“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.”

SpiritualityAmbivalence
Book:Religion: The Ultimate STD: Living a Spiritual Life without Dogmatics or Cultural Destruction
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“Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation– 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.”

ImpossibleIntelligenceHopelessHopelessnessAmbivalenceInner ConflictAmbivalentOpposing ViewsImplausible
Book:The Crack-up
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“Ambitious young women today are taught to ignore or suppress every natural instinct, if it conflicts with the feminist agenda posed on them. All literary and artistic works, no matter how great, that document the ambivalence of female sexuality they are trained to dismiss as "misogynous." In other words, their minds are being programmed to secede from their bodies ... there is a huge gap between feminist rhetoric and women's actual sex lives, where feminism is of little help except with a certain stratum of deferential, malleable, white middle-class men.”

IfsMenMindLittlesMatterHelpingBodyTodayYoungCertainSexNaturalWhiteClassFeminismMiddleTaughtHugeConflictFemaleInstinctFeministSexualityArtisticMiddle ClassAgendasGapsAmbitiousRhetoricYoung WomenDocumentsAmbivalenceFemale SexualityNatural InstinctLittle Help
Author:Camille Paglia
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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.”

YearsHas BeensMatterCharacterPoliticalDesireGivenNumbersSecretEmotionIssuesInfluenceConversationAnxietyWeaponsWingsGuiltIdeologyRadicalProportionUnconsciousOppositionAggressiveContinuingRight WingIntimidatedParalyzedAmbivalenceInsurgency
Author:Ellen Willis
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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.”

LoveHumansShowsHateLove IsCircumstancesAnd LoveObservationUnexpectedLove HateHuman RelationsHuman RelationshipsLove And HateClinicalsAmbivalencePolarityForerunners
Book:Major Works
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“I confess to feeling continued ambivalence about political life, aware of its shortcomings and disappointments, but drawn back to it again and again because of its infinite promise. Justice can triumph, wrongs can be righted, and pain can be alleviated, if the right fix is found. The optimistic illusion that one can change the world is difficult to resist, especially when from time to time that illusion is sustained by even a hint of reality. Change does happen in the political process.”

IfsWorldDoeFeelingsRealityHappensPainPoliticalFoundPoliticsProcessDifficultJusticePromiseIllusionInfiniteDisappointmentOptimisticTriumphChanging The WorldAgain And AgainHintsShortcomingsPolitical LifeAmbivalence
Author:Madeleine M. Kunin
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“... social roles vary in the extent to which it is culturally permissible to express ambivalence or negative feelings toward them.Ambivalence can be admitted most readily toward those roles that are optional, least where they are considered primary. Thus men repress negative feelings toward work and feel freer to express negative feelings toward leisure, sex and marriage, while women are free to express negative feelings toward work but tend to repress them toward family roles.”

MenFeelsFeelingsSocialSexRolesNegativePrimariesLeisureVaryOptionalAmbivalenceNegative FeelingsSocial Roles
Author:Alice S Rossi
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“Indeed, it is that ambiguity and ambivalence which often is so puzzling in women--the quality of shifting from child to woman, theseeming helplessness one moment and the utter self-reliance the next that baffle us, that seem most difficult to understand. These are the qualities that make her a mystery, the qualities that provoked Freud to complain, "What does a woman want?”

WantChildrenDoeSelfMomentsSeemsNextDifficultQualityMysteryComplainingSelf RelianceRelianceShiftingAmbiguityHelplessnessOften IsWomen WantProvokedAmbivalencePuzzling
Author:Lillian B. Rubin
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“Whether outside work is done by choice or not, whether women seek their identity through work, whether women are searching for pleasure or survival through work, the integration of motherhood and the world of work is a source of ambivalence, struggle, and conflict for the great majority of women.”

WorldDoneChoicesPleasureStruggleIdentitySourceConflictSurvivalMajorityMotherhoodIntegrationAmbivalence
Book:Worlds apart: relationships between families and schools
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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.”

BookEyeFilmFormYoungCultureParentLevelsSuccessfulViolenceArmsIndustryInstinctVideoTreatmentInterfereAdolescencePowerlessTextureSchizophreniaAmbivalenceYoung Parents
Author:C. Sommerville
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