Quotes About Acceptance

He is grieving, for sure—the loss of his lover, his career, his novel, his youth—so why not cover the mirrors, rend the fabric over his heart, and just let himself mourn? Perhaps he should try alone.

What could be more normal than to be out of place everywhere you go?

the grief...had never been over him, a clumsy foreign child. It had always been for themselves, so young then, learning that you could not tailor your hopes like a suit and expect them to fit forever

Nothing to do but laugh about it. True for everything.

Arthur Less has been out of place many times in his life... He has done them all. So being in a place of utter misrule and chaos is no problem for him. In some way, that is the comfort zone of Arthur Less. He knows, in such places, where he stands.

All parenting turns on a crucial question: to what extent parents should accept their children for who they are, and to what extent they should help them become their best selves.

Having always imagined myself in a fairly slim minority, I suddenly saw that I was in a vast company. Difference unites us. While each of these experiences can isolate those who are affected, together they compose an aggregate of millions whose struggles connect them profoundly. The exceptional is ubiquitous; to be entirely typical is the rare and lonely state.

Those who believe their suffering has been valuable love more readily than those who see no meaning in their pain. Suffering does not necessarily imply love, but love implies suffering

If we tolerate prejudice toward any group, we tolerate it toward all groups," he said. "I couldn't have relationships that were conditional on excluding my brother—or anyone else. We are all in one fight, and our freedom is all the same freedom.

I told her that what was most important to me was not whether she loved a man or a woman, but that she loved and was loved well—that she experience passion, and the wonderful surprise of finding that someone feels about you as strongly as you do about them, lucky and full-hearted.

Fixing is the illness model; acceptance is the identity model; which way any family goes reflects their assumptions and resources.

Belonging is one of the things that makes life bearable, and it can be tough to look at a binary world and choose against both sides.

Treating an identity as an illness invites real illness to make a braver stand.

I hate the loss of diversity in the world, even though I sometimes get a little worn out by being that diversity.

I realized that I had demanded that my parents accept me but had resisted accepting them.

Love, no matter what.

Labeling a child's mind as diseased—whether with autism, intellectual disabilities, or transgenderism—may reflect the discomfort that mind gives parents more than any discomfort it causes their child. Much gets corrected that might better have been left alone.

What to say? That I would have loved to make the trip but was busy staying out of the mental hospital? It's so humiliating—so degrading. If I knew I wouldn't get caught, I'd love to lie about it—invent an acceptable cancer, that recurs and vanishes, that people could understand—that wouldn't make them frightened and uncomfortable.

For some parents of children with horizontal identities, acceptance reaches its apogee when parents conclude that while they supposed they were pinioned by a great and catastrophic loss of hope, they were in fact falling in love with someone they didn't yet know enough to want.

Mental illness is real illness

If something or someone doesn't work, it's in a state of grace, progress, and evolution. It will attract love and empathy. If it does work, it has merely completed its job and is probably dead.

I'll tell them all the good things and some difficulties. The parents may never accept what happened to them and yet accept their child. They're two separate things, the parental loss, and the actual person they will almost always end up loving.

when describing children with Down's Syndrome, he called a child 'heart spontaneous'.

Therapy allows a person to make sense of the new self he has attained on medication, and to accept the loss of self that occurred during a breakdown. You need to be reborn after a severe episode, and you need to learn the behaviors that may protect against relapse. You need to run your life differently from how you ran it before.