Quotes About Acceptance

She knows herself to be at the mercy of events, and she knows by now that events have no mercy.

Maybe that's what love is, I thought: it's being pissed off.

When I was younger I used to think that if I could hug myself tight enough I could make myself smaller, because there was never enough room for me, at home or anywhere, but if I was smaller then I would fit in.

All observations of life are harsh, because life is. I lament that fact, but I cannot change it.

To go from a familiar thing, however undesirable, into the unknown, is always a matter for apprehension, and I suppose that is why so many people are afraid to die.

The past is so much safer, because whatever's in it has already happened. It can't be changed; so, in a way, there's nothing to dread.

Messy love is better than none, I guess. I am no authority on sane living.

But who can remember pain, once it's over?

Giving up was the new normal, and I have to say it was catching.

I, too, was once like you: fatally hooked on life.

She doesn't think it's a good idea to know the future, because you can hardly ever change it, so why suffer twice?

No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well. But despite everything, we didn't do badly by one another, we did as well as most. I wish she were here, so I could tell her I finally know this.

I'm fine, said Pilar, for the moment. And the moment is the only time we can be fine in.

You are a transitional generation, said Aunt Lydia. It is the hardest for you. We know the sacrifices you are being expected to make. It is hard when men revile you. For the ones who come after you, it will be easier. They will accept their duties with willing hearts. She did not say: Because they will have no memories, of any other way. She said: Because they won't want things they can't have.

I have periods now, like normal girls; I too am among the knowing, I too can sit out volleyball games and go to the nurse's for aspirin and waddle along the halls with a pad like a flattened rabbit tail wadded between my legs, sopping with liver-colored blood.

She talks with wolves, without knowing what sort of beasts they are: Where have you been all my life? they ask. Where have I been all my life? she replies.

I didn't much like it, this grudge-holding against the past.

Nobody's heart is perfect.

I said maybe I was too sad for the job: didn't they want a more upbeat personality in their girls? But Mordis smiled with his shiny black-ant eyes and said, as if he was patting me: "Ren. Ren. Everyone's too sad for everything.

This world is not enough, but it will have to do. You can either hold on or let go.

Toast is me. I am toast.

The way love feels is always only approximate. I would like to be without shame. I would like to be shameless. I would like to be ignorant. Then I would not know how ignorant I was.

Me, it's the heart: that's the part lacking. I used to want one: a dainty cushion of red silk dangling from a blood ribbon, fit for sticking pins in. But I've changed my mind. Hearts hurt. — Margaret Atwood, from "The Tin Woodwoman Gets a Massage ," Dearly: New Poems (Ecco, 2020)

If you can't stop the waves, go sailing.