Quotes About Acceptance

me if everything was all right. I replied, "Everything's copacetic." And it was in fact "copacetic"—our word for "fine and dandy.

I forgive you, I said. I said what I had to. I would die by pieces to save myself from real death.

Last night it had been my father who had finally said it: She's never coming home. A clear and easy piece of truth that everyone who had ever known me had accepted. But he needed to say it, and she needed to hear him say it.

But she was waiting patiently. She no longer believed in talk. It never rescued anything. At seventy she had come to believe in time alone.

Then a little voice in him said, Let go, let go, let go

I was in the air around him. I was in the cold mornings he had now. I was in the quiet time he spent alone. I was the girl he had chosen to kiss. He wanted, somehow to set me free. -Susie Salmon

My grandmother stepped back into the kitchen to get their drinks. I had come to love her more after death than I ever had on Earth. I wish I could say that in that moment in the kitchen she decided to quit drinking, but I now saw that drinking was a part of what made her who she was. If the worst of what she left on Earth was a legacy of inebriated support, it was a good legacy in my book. ~Susie's grandmother, Lynn pgs 315-316

I tried to take solace in Holiday, our dog. I missed him in a way I hadn't yet let myself miss my mother and father, my sister and brother. That way of missing would mean that I had accepted that I would never be with them again; it might sound silly but I didn't believe it, would not believe it.

If you stop asking why you were killed instead of someone else, stop investigating the vacuum left by your loss, stop wondering what everyone left on Earth is feeling, you can be free. Simply put, you have to give up on Earth.

After a few days in heaven, I realized that the javelin-throwers and the shot-putters and the boys who played basketball on the cracked blacktop were all in their own version of heaven. Theirs just fit with mine- didn't duplicate it precisely, but had a lot of the same things going on inside. ~pg 17

Heaven wasn't perfect.

I was unable to recognize something that I would come up against time and time again. You could not be filled with hate and be beautiful. Like any girl, I wanted to be beautiful. But I was filled with hate. So how could I be both..?

I knew my mother's limitations because they formed the marrow of my bones.

When the dead are done with the living, the living can go on to other things.

You're dead and you have to accept it.

When was it all right to let go not only of the dead but of the living—to learn to accept?

Oh sweetheart, do you really think if you seal it up, that the pain's gonna go away?

If I was aware I would have to tie laces I would not have been able to put my feet into socks.

When the dead are done with the living," Franny said to me, "the living can go on to other things.

News slipped out and the world didn't explode and eventually I could count on passing out. I had a headache in the morning and I always threw up, but Jamie, and everyone, it seemed, liked me when I was drunk. The added bonus: I often didn't remember much.

No one knew how he continued to do what he did, while simultaneously they wanted him to shut all signs of his grief away, place it in a file somewhere and tuck it in a drawer that no one would be asked to open again.

He wore his own innocence like a comfortable old coat.

Your sordid life is your sordid life. You shouldn't live it if you don't like it.

Helped are those who are content to be themselves; they will never lack mystery in their lives and the joys of self-discovery will be constant.