'contradictory quality' is correct and usable in written English.
It is used to describe something that is characterized by two opposing attributes. For example, you could say, "The cold weather had a contradictory quality--it was simultaneously calming and unsettling."
And, atop it, in the Kremlin, is Boris Yeltsin, who personifies all those contradictory qualities and impulses.
Unfortunately, the notion that contradictory qualities can coexist in the same man seems beyond the authors' grasp.
Often, her fiction drew its energy from contradictory qualities: her stories were minutely observed but also suspenseful, matter-of-fact but also fanciful, reportorial but also imaginative.
For Plato, Ms. Lichtenstein writes, color painting has "all the contradictory qualities of the pharmakon," a "magic and maleficent" drug that is both a remedy and a poison.
The wit, economy and detachment that she achieved in her fiction also played in her personality, and there, too, they masked contradictory qualities.
He loved our part of the south and his work reflected southerners' innately contradictory qualities of ambiguity and plain-spokenness, cruelty and kindness, illumination and obscurity.
In medals, crowns, haloes and rings, gold has simultaneously represented the sometimes contradictory qualities of heroism, wealth, power, divinity and purity.
He was a great draftsman and designer and could harmonize in his prints the two seemingly contradictory qualities of elegance and power.
These seemingly contradictory qualities stem partly from Mr. Peña's uneven script, but primarily from a towering performance by Ching Valdes-Aran, the actress at its center.
The foundation of a song by How to Destroy Angels called "Ice Age" is a stringed instrument that has contradictory qualities — a bell-like tone as well as a plunk that sounds like a coconut being struck with a mallet.
