Life & Wisdom Quote by Marion Zimmer Bradley

The line lands like a confession that refuses to clean itself up. "He used to sit on my lap" is a domestic image that should read as tender, but Bradley yanks it into moral static with "I was sort of ambivalent about that". Ambivalent is doing two jobs at once: it’s honest about discomfort, and it’s also a protective euphemism, the kind that flattens sharper words (fear, guilt, disgust, complicity) into something socially manageable. The phrase "sort of" shrinks the speaker further, as if minimizing the sentence might minimize whatever happened around it.

Then the last sentence detonates the scene: "He was surviving any way he could". It reframes the lap not as affection but as strategy, implying desperation and an unequal power dynamic. The speaker isn’t centered as victim; she’s a witness to someone else’s survival tactics, and her ambivalence reads like the uneasy awareness that she benefited from, tolerated, or failed to stop a situation where survival required improvisation. It’s an ethical portrait drawn in negative space: what isn’t named is the point.

Context matters with Bradley, whose legacy is inseparable from allegations and a broader reckoning about how we read celebrated fantasy authors when their private worlds turn out to be brutal. Whether or not this quote is autobiographical, it’s written with the plainspoken chill of someone describing boundary erosion as routine. It works because it denies the reader catharsis: no dramatic language, no absolution, just the banal syntax of a memory that still can’t be made safe.