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

His yellow eyes vacillate between me and Autumn.

From "Kwame Crashes the Underworld" by Craig Kofi Farmer

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

Meanwhile, Merritt vacillates between despair at the prospect of her eviction and elation when she dreams of returning to Poplar Boulevard.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 3, 2024

He apparently vacillates between moments of sleeping with his mouth open in a sign of utter disinterest and being jolted to stare menacingly at witnesses, the judge and other people in the courtroom.

From Salon ● Apr. 29, 2024

As the score vacillates between rhythmic, melodic passages and warped dissonance, they look at times like they’re trying to worm their way out of their bodies.

From New York Times ● Apr. 24, 2023

Between these ifs he vacillates, swung like a ship on stormy waters, touching heaven and hell.

From The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 by Various

The president’s tone toward the court has vacillated since then.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 15, 2026

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

I vacillated frenetically between oversize and undersize clothes, ambivalent about whether I wanted to draw attention or repel it.

From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 8, 2024

My emotions vacillated from fury to giddiness to crushing depression on an hourly basis.

From Salon ● Nov. 5, 2023

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

The arrival of the Iamaleava brothers prompted quarterbacks Joey Aguilar and Robert McDaniel to enter the transfer portal, with Demaricus Davis vacillating on his future, according to Foster.

From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 27, 2025

Oppenheimer modulates the lighting during the scenes from cool to warm and back again, underlining the vacillating feelings they can’t acknowledge outright.

From New York Times ● Dec. 5, 2024

Throwing in with the CRM never stopped her from vacillating back and forth between her identities: Jadis and Anne, Alexandria and the authoritarian military.

From Salon ● Mar. 25, 2024

Jam could see a whole river of things in his face, currents shifting and swelling, vacillating from grief to fury.

From "Pet" by Akwaeke Emezi