Quotes About Acceptance

I heard my old friend Clem's voice coming back to me through the dimness of thirty years: "I see you coming here trying to make sense where there is no sense. Try just living in it. Respond, alter, see what happens." I thought of the African way of perceiving life, as experience to be lived rather than as problem to be solved.

As the light wanes I see what I thought I was anxious to surrender I am only willing to lend

Battling racism and battling heterosexism and battling apartheid share the same urgency inside me as battling cancer. None of these struggles are ever easy, and even the smallest victory is never to be taken for granted. Each victory must be applauded, because it is so easy not to battle at all, to just accept and call that acceptance inevitable.

When we admit and deal with difference; when we deal with the deep bitterness; when we deal with the horror of even our different nightmares; when we turn them and look at them, it's like looking at death: hard but possible. If you look at it directly without embracing it, then there is much less that you can ever be made to fear.

The terror of Black Lesbians is buried in that deep inner place where we have been taught to fear all difference—to kill or ignore it. Be assured: loving women is not a communicable disease. You don't catch it like the common cold.

It is within our differences that we are both most powerful and most vulnerable, and some of the most difficult tasks of our lives are the claiming of differences and learning to use those differences for bridges rather than as barriers between us.

Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.

If I can look directly at my life and my death without flinching I know there is nothing they can ever do to me again.

I feel not to be open about who I am in all respects places a certain kind of expectation on me I'm just not into meeting any more.

Mainstream communication does not want women, particularly white women, responding to racism. It wants racism to be accepted as an immutable given in the fabric of existence, like evening time or the common cold.

But in this plastic, anti-human society in which we live, there have never been too many people buying fat Black girls born almost blind and ambidextrous, gay or straight.

You're very beautiful," I said suddenly, embarrassed at my own daring. There was a moment of silence as Eudora put down her hammer. "So are you, Chica," she said, quietly, "more beautiful than you know." Her eyes held mine for a minute so I could not turn away. No one had ever said that to me before.

But fear and anxiety are not the same at all. One is an appropriate response to a real situation which I can accept and learn to work through just as I work through semi-blindness. But the other, anxiety, is an immobilizing yield to things that go bump in the night, a surrender to namelessness, formlessness, voicelessness, and silence.

IF this society ascribes roles to Black men which they are not allowed to fulfill, is it Black women who must bend and alter our lives to compensate, or is it society that needs changing? And why should Black men accept these roles as correct ones, or anything other than a narcotic promise encouraging acceptance of other facets of their own oppression?

When we turn from anger we turn from insight, saying we will accept only the designs already known, deadly and safely familiar.

when we look at our differences and not allow ourselves to be divided, when we own them and are not divided by them, that is when we will be able to move on.

One thing has always kept me going– and it's not really courage or bravery, unless that's what courage or bravery is made of– is a sense that there are so many ways in which I'm vulnerable and cannot help but be vulnerable, I'm not going to be more vulnerable by putting weapons of silence in my enemies' hands. Being an open lesbian in the Black community is not easy, although being closeted is even harder.

How is the systematic erosion of freedoms gradually accomplished? What kind of gradual erosion of our status as United States citizens will Black people be persuaded first to ignore and then to accept?

I must let this pain flow through me and pass on. If I resist or try to stop it, it will detonate inside me, shatter me, splatter my pieces against every wall and person that I touch.

remember thinking for a while that I was the only Black lesbian living in the Village

The above forms of human blindness [racism, sexism, heterosexism, homophobia] stem from the same root - an inability to recognize the notion of difference as a dynamic human force, one which is enriching rather than threatening to the defined self, when there are shared goals.

No matter what she'd done, you have to say... You have to say, 'It wouldn't have made a bit if difference.

But unfortunately, I am a man, and there is nothing for me to do but, like a Roman, fold my arms across my breast and hold my breath till I die. DOCTOR.

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