Quotes About Acceptance

I think that while I hated being depressed and would hate to be depressed again, I found a way to love my depression. I love it because it forced me to cling to joy. I love it because each day I decide, sometimes gamely, sometimes against the moment's reason, to cleave to the reasons for living-and that, I think, is a highly privileged rapture.

This book's conundrum is that most of the families described here have ended up grateful for experiences they would have done anything to avoid.

But you are never the same once you have acquired the knowledge that there is no self that will not crumble. We are told to learn self-reliance, but it's tricky if you have no self on which to rely.

You are in touch with the real terribleness of your life. You can accept rationally that later, after the medication sets in, you will be better able to deal with the terribleness, but you will not be free of it.

Even in the best of spirits, it's always been as though I wrestle with the present in a vain effort to stop its becoming the past.

There is a basic emotional spectrum from which we cannot and should not escape, and I believe that depression is in that spectrum, located near not only grief but also love. Indeed I believe that all the strong emotions

All that children can properly require of their parents is that they tolerate their own muddled spectrum - that they neither insist on the lie of perfect happiness nor lapse into the slipshod brutality of giving up.

I hate the loss of diversity in the world, even though I sometimes get a little worn out by being that diversity. I don't wish for anyone in particular to be gay

Cleaving to our own lives, with all their challenges and limitations and particularities, is vital.

We like categories and clubs as much as we ever have, it's only that the ones we thought were inviolable turn out not to be, and others that we never imagined are taking their place.

You can't fit in with people by pretending to be just like they are; you fit in by engaging in a dialogue about your differences, and by putting aside the assumption that your way of life is in any way preferable to theirs.

With the wonder and bitterness of someone pardoned for a crime she did not commit I come back to marriage and friends, to pink fringed hollyhocks; come back to my desk, books, and chair.

Let me bury here the rage I feel to have been twice robbed: once of the child I wanted, and once of the son I loved.

Much gets corrected that might better have been left alone.

There is no contradiction between loving someone and feeling burdened by that person; indeed, love tends to magnify the burden. These parents need space for their ambivalence, whether they can allow it for themselves or not. For those who love, there should be no shame in being exhausted—even in imagining another life.

No one can do anything but beg for help (if he can do even that) at the lowest depths of a major depression, but once the help is provided, it must also be accepted.

the polar opposite of suffering [is] boredom." I believe that pain needs to be transformed but not forgotten; gainsaid but not obliterated. I

The LP actress Linda Hunt once wrote, 'Dwarfism, after all, isn't like cancer or heart disease. It isn't fatal, and it isn't even an illness. It is physical, though, and inescapable. You don't get over it. It is you. But you aren't it, and that's an important distinction.

unlike Edith Piaf, I regret everything just because it is finished

Andrew Solomon

must love them for themselves

When the child does not conform to this image, the parents often need help in adapting their behavior to the reality—they

Some kinds of grace would not have entered the world if everyone's hips and legs worked the same way. Deformity has been brought into beauty's fold, a catalyst for justice rather than an affront to it.

Problemele lor sunt cu adev?rat grave ?i, chiar dac? nu pricepem de ce, trebuie s? accept?m gravitatea acestei chestiuni.