What is "ambivalent"

Usage examples of "ambivalent".

Though ambivalent, Kennedy, seeking credibility in Vietnam, was for the moment in favor of increased effort and wanted affirmation rather than information, as his choice of envoys indicates.

Kensington Methodist Hall expressed in stone the ambivalent feelings of prosperous Methodists, who be424 KEN FOLLETT lieved in religious simplicity but secretly longed to display their wealth.

Zelzony has settled to a painful brood over her explosive and ambivalent emotions, trying to wrestle them into a shape more pleasing to her and more conducive to maintaining her self-esteem.

She could not help feeling ambivalent about it, though, full of hope and worry.

For a fleeting moment Laura thought Katie was ambivalent about going away.

And so, trapped in this ambivalent double bind, God tortures Schreber by producing in him the imperious urge to shit, while simultaneously denying him the ability to do so.

Now, her feelings toward him were ambivalent again, especially with Thalia and Kiel still acting decidedly wintry.

Independence Day was an ambivalent festival in the defeated South, but occasions for a celebration of any kind were rare, and society made the most of them.

He looked at the thin, frail woman sitting on the bench, her child held firmly in her protective embrace, and guessed that North was an ambivalent destination for her, an ideal to cling to because she had nothing else, and wished he could help and give her some other purpose.

Sternberg, by an insidious pedagogical Mesmer of an archery coach, from an ambivalent parental Catholicism to Trinitarianism, known also as Mathurinism or Redemptionism.

Switters considered a similar, perhaps synchronous indulgence but decided instead to review the prophecies, about which he maintained, not altogether uncharacteristically, ambivalent feelings.

Finally, they turned their back on the nation-building lessons from the Balkans and other crisis zones and fashioned a plan that unrealistically sought to shift much of the burden onto a defeated and ethnically diverse population and allied nations that were enormously ambivalent about the invasion.

Now she was in a region of ambivalent drives, and of nebulous and stillborn wishes, anxieties, doubts interwoven with regressive beliefs and libido wishes of a fantastic nature.

Most of the students in the class seemed glad that the New Obstetrical Technologies existed but were somewhat ambivalent about their moral, psychological, and social repercussions.

Jefferson had been slower, more cautious and ambivalent than Adams about resolving his views on independence.