Quotes About Acceptance

Sighs are the punctuation of most of our lives, of relief, of how much worse it could have been, of "Now what?

Don't try harder—resist less." This

Thank God I am in charge of so little, or this could never have happened; life is much wilder, richer, and more profound than I am comfortable with.

Hello, Dearest. I'm so glad it's you!" I've come to believe that this is how God feels when I pray, even at my least attractive.

I'm pretty sure that it is only by experiencing that ocean of sadness in a naked and immediate way that we come to be healed—which is to say, that we come to experience life with a real sense of presence and spaciousness and peace.

Love can bring people out of isolation, get them to take off the Halloween masks they wear, breathing through the slits.

Death is...usually doable, astonishing but plain.

It is the most difficult Zen practice to leave people to their destiny, even though it's painful—just loving them, and breathing with them, and distracting them in a sweet way, and laughing with them.

You show up as is, hangdog, skeptical, pissy, or superior. Someone welcomes you and pats the seat next to them. Someone will get other people water, or watch the kids, or do a neighbor's laundry, or wash somebody's feet.

Could you say this about yourself right now, that you have immense and intrinsic value, at your current weight and income level, while waiting to hear if you got the job or didn't, or sold your book or didn't? This idea that I had all the value I'd ever need was concealed from me my whole life. I want a refund. In this world of suffering and grace, of brokenness and sky, of bad skin and buckteeth and one another, I cannot add to the value of myself.

As Father Ed Dowling said, sometimes heaven is just a new pair of glasses. When we put them on, we see the awful person, sometimes even ourselves, a bit more gently, and we are blessed in return. It seems, on the face of things, like a decent deal.

We are lovely as sparrows, and all sparrows are sweet. No one thinks, "That sparrow is kind of a loser, and boy, is that one letting herself go.

You can change the world with a hot bath if you sink into from a place of knowing you are worthy of profound care, even if you are dirty and rattled.

It is okay to fear death. Many people who don't can be a little too pleased with themselves.

surrender means you get to come on over to the winning side.

we won't love you if you're perfect

Isn't this planet big enough for differences?

Don't store guilt for future use. Afra

Given the infinite variety of human personalities, it was impossible to like everyone.

What I know I wish I didn't. What I'd give anything to know, I have to wait and see.

Even as a child, even as my blood-past was drained from me, I understood that if I were strong enough to accept it, I was being offered a second history.

Somewhere there is a man who is not afraid to live in a woman's hope

I learned to tolerate images rising in me like bruises.

The mainland can stretch until it breaks at the weakest points, and those weaknesses are called faults. Each island represented a victory and a defeat: it had either pulled itself free or pulled too hard and found itself alone. Later, as these islands grew older, they turned their misfortune into virtue, learned to accept their cragginess, their misshapen coasts, ragged where they'd been torn. They acquired grace.