Daily Inspiration Quote by Erica Jong

Ambivalence usually gets treated like a personality bug: indecision dressed up as complexity. Erica Jong flips it into choreography. Calling it "a wonderful tune to dance to" turns emotional conflict into something embodied, playful, even stylish. The line doesn’t excuse wavering; it reframes it as motion. You may not know where you’ll land, but you’re not frozen. You’re moving.

The metaphor works because it borrows the social permission of dancing. Dancing is public, sensual, and unashamedly provisional; you can improvise, change partners, miss a step, recover. Ambivalence, in Jong’s hands, becomes less a moral failure than a survival skill for people navigating competing desires: autonomy vs. attachment, ambition vs. domestic expectation, pleasure vs. respectability. That’s a familiar Jong terrain. As a novelist associated with second-wave feminism’s frankness about female interior life, she’s defending the messy middle space that culture often demands women tidy up into certainty.

"It has a rhythm all its own" is the quiet provocation. Rhythm implies pattern, not chaos. The subtext is that mixed feelings aren’t just noise; they have logic, timing, and even wisdom. Ambivalence can be a diagnostic instrument: it tells you where you’re split, where the rules don’t fit, where the choice is rigged. In a world that sells clarity as virtue and decisiveness as character, Jong gives ambivalence its own music and dares you to keep time with it.