Quotes About Acceptance

Time is not kind to everything.

We really only came around to accepting and integrating the propositional dimension of identity into a concept of ourselves at the time of the American Revolution.

The thought of my mortality - I think about it a lot. I find it motivating. It can be any time that your number's up.

Since it is the Other within us who is old, it is natural that the revelation of our age should come to us from outside --from others. We do not accept it willingly.

Thirty seconds is the exact amount of time Americans can tolerate something they don't understand.

Maybe you won't find a place where you fit in for a very long time, but you eventually will.

But Time is a great traitor who teaches us to accept loss.

Each hour comes with some little faggot of God's will fastened upon its back.

The easiest time to cure an illness is before it is accepted as a part of the self-image.

I was disillusioned by Hollywood at the time, but now I've come to accept that's just the way things are: it's called show business, not show art.

I can't do it, Uncle Richard, I said. You can. You have it in you to do it. You're a good person. I'm not. I don't want to be a good person. I started to cry. He held me close then. And what he said surprised me. What makes you think any of us want to be good people, Ebie? You know, I never agreed with these Puritan preachers, who tell us we're all inherently bad. I think we're all inherently good. And we fight against it, all our lives.

But Elizabeth Diane was not happy. She still felt invisible. She studied harder, hoping to achieve acceptance with better and better grades. No one seemed to notice her.

You do not know just what you've been forgiven.

And you know, I agree to everything: I will condemn, I will forget, I will give comfort to the enemy, Darkness will be light and sin lovely.

After all, things are what they are. A message is a message, plates are plates, men are men, and life is life.

Our love of lockstep is our greatest curse, the source of all that bedevils us. It is the source of homophobia, xenophobia, racism, sexism, terrorism, bigotry of every variety and hue, because it tells us there is one right way to do things, to look, to behave, to feel, when the only right way is to feel your heart hammering inside you and to listen to what its timpani is saying.

Maybe crazy is just the word we use for feelings that will not be contained.

A week in the hospital she had told us. A hysterectomy, she had said. It had seemed unremarkable to me in a woman of forty-six long finished with childbearing, although every day that I grow older I realize there is never anything unremarkable about losing any part of what makes you female - a breast, a womb, a child, a man.

Perhaps only when we've made our peace with our own selves can we really be the kind of friends who listen, advise, but don't judge, or not too harshly.

I'm fine, she said. But her smile was bleak, without light or warmth. And for the first time I thought of what it must be like to know that you were going to die, that the trees would bud, flower, leaf, dry, die, and you would not be there to see any of it.

Life is haphazard. We plan, and then we deal when the plans go awry. Control is an illusion; best intentions are the best we can do.

It's so much easier, to learn to love what you have instead of yearning always for what you're missing, or what you imagine you're missing. It's so much more peaceful.

Occasionally someone will tell me that they won't have pets because they're messy, and I suppose there's some truth to that, between the fur and the slobber and the occasional puddle on the floor. I have to choke down the temptation to respond that life is messy, and its vagaries go down hardest with those who fool themselves into thinking they can keep it neat.

easing up on seventy, an age when a man might be forgiven follicular failure.