Ambivalence is like carbon monoxide – undetectable yet deadly.

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

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.

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.

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.

We don’t do ambivalence well in America. We do courage of our convictions. We do might makes right. Ambivalence is French. Certainty is American.