«Modern science knows much about such conflicts. We call the mental state that engenders it AMBIVALENCE: a collision between thought and feeling.»

«The only thing that seems eternal and natural in motherhood is ambivalence»

«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.»

«Ambivalence about family responsibilities has a long history in the corporate world.»

«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.»

«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.»

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

«How often my fear and ambivalence are rooted in what somebody else may think. But I need not present my actions, my words, myself for somebody else's approval. And basing my decisions on somebody else's approval or making my own approval contingent on somebody else's only postpones what I really want.»