Candace Bushnell Quotes

The satirist is prevented by repulsion from gaining a better knowledge of the world he is attracted to, yet he is forced by attraction to concern himself with the world that repels him.

We tend to have mixed feelings about the holy. There is a sense in which we are at the same time attracted to it and repulsed by it. Something draws us toward it, while at the same time we want to run away from it. We can’t seem to decide which way we want it. Part of us yearns for the holy, while part of us despises it. We can’t live with it, and we can’t live without it.

we are drawn to each other like drops of water, like the planets we repulse each other like magnets, like the color of our skin.

When I define polarities in my work, I actually create the space between things. I point to the question I am actually interested in, without naming it.

I have a love/hate relationship with just about everything, but certainly with America.

Light is meaningful only in relation to darkness, and truth presupposes error. It is these mingled opposites which people our life, which make it pungent, intoxicating. We only exist in terms of this conflict, in the zone where black and white clash.

The best characters are the ones that somehow manage to be both attractive and repulsive at the same time. If you do that, you're at the center of the universe - if you can find characters who are more ambiguous and can raise more questions than answers.

I've been simultaneously drawn to and repelled from Hollywood for years.

A lot of what I was wanting to do in my work and what I have been doing has been about the unexpected... that unexpected situation of wanting to be the heroine and yet wanting to kill the heroine at the same time.

The most exciting attractions are between two opposites that never meet.

We have the ability to attract and repel at the same time, which I think you should embrace. Otherwise, you're just going to be, like, this Neil Diamond act.

It would take too long to explain the intimate alliance of contradictions in human nature which makes love itself wear at times the desperate shape of betrayal. And perhaps there is no possible explanation.

I am a woman and my business is to hold things together. My business is to tear them apart.

Contradiction is the lever of transcendence.

The tension of opposites: Life is a series of pulls back and forth. You want to do one thing, but you are bound to do something else. Something hurts you, yet you know it shouldn't. You take certain things for granted, even when you know you should never take anything for granted. A tension of opposites, like a pull on a rubber band. And most of us live somewhere in the middle.

Everything was good. But it was awful, too.

They were like two magnets who couldn't decide whether to attract or repel.

I was within and without. Simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.

Flight is intolerable contradiction.

Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things. The honest thief, the tender murderer, the superstitious atheist.

The conflict of forces and the struggle of opposing wills are of the essence of our universe and alone hold it together.

People think of Paris as the city of love or the city of light, but where you got love you got hate, where you got light you got darkness.

If ice can burn, then love and hate can mate.

The aphorism wants to be at the same time both main line and off beat.

And where love ends, hate begins