vacillate

You have to see it so many times because you have to vacillate between watching the show and watching the audience.

From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 13, 2024

The Oscars can often vacillate between insidery navel-gazing and a ho-hum march toward best picture, but occasionally an acceptance speech cuts through the noise with authenticity.

From New York Times ● Mar. 13, 2023

His leadership skills were lackluster, he was not a charismatic or inspiring speaker, he tended to vacillate in decision-making and he struggled to retain the best staffers.

From Salon ● Jul. 24, 2022

We are a nation traumatized into forgetting, psyches so pulverized by mass death that we vacillate wildly between rage and numbness—waiting until the cycle begins again, so frequent it masquerades as normalcy.

From Slate ● May 25, 2022

I did not dwell on the situation at Fort Hare, but life has a way of forcing decisions on those who vacillate.

From "Long Walk to Freedom" by Nelson Mandela

It is closer to music than epic, a mesmerizing suite of songs that conveys Tennyson’s private sorrow as he vacillates from unbearable agony to precarious hope.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Feb. 20, 2026

Driven by a dark kineticism, it vacillates between contempt and gratitude at a velocity that catches my husband, my therapist, even me off-guard.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 3, 2024

When he isn’t mugging for Reed’s camera he vacillates between a stony-faced refusal to admit guilt and an approximation of remorse.

From Salon ● Mar. 26, 2024

The rhythmic language vacillates widely between insistent pulse and total freedom.

From New York Times ● Jun. 9, 2022

For the hero of Promethidenlos vacillates between poetry and sculpture, but is able to give himself freely to neither art because of his overwhelming sense of social injustice and human suffering.

From The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann Volume I by Gerhart Hauptmann

Instead, I vacillated between forgetting all about cancer some days and feeling like death was imminent others, and it was hard to predict what would prompt either extreme.

From Slate ● May 6, 2026

Washington has vacillated between pressing Europe to hit China with tariffs to cutting its own deals with Beijing.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 28, 2025

His children, Kelly and Jack, vacillated between showering him with affection and berating him for not catering to their whims.

From Salon ● Jul. 24, 2025

It was the first in a series of scary scenes for Brinkley, whose feelings for Joel vacillated between veneration, unconditional love and abject fear.

From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 29, 2025

She and Bunny had a relationship the likes of which I had seldom seen except in couples married for twenty years or more, a relationship which vacillated between the touching and the annoying.

From "The Secret History" by Donna Tartt

They pose the theory that the stock market is vacillating between thematic momentum and macro conditions.

From MarketWatch ● Jun. 15, 2026

Whereas “The Homecoming” was noted for its claustrophobic machismo, here it’s the women who dominate the proceedings, vacillating between sisterly tenderness and bitter recriminations.

From New York Times ● Feb. 9, 2024

We hate vacillating on matters of major consequence.

From Seattle Times ● Jan. 14, 2024

Not surprisingly, being the center of such wildly vacillating public opinion took its toll.

From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 12, 2023

Aliya’s face is flustered, vacillating between concern and disbelief.

From "Saints and Misfits" by S.K. Ali