Quotes About Acceptance

THE MOTHER: You don't ask much of life, do you? THE LADY: Why should I? You don't get what you ask for anyway.

TROY: Death ain't nothing. I done seen him. Done wrasled with him. You can't tell me nothing about death. death ain't nothing but a fastball on the outside corner. And you know what I'll do to that! Lookee here, Bono...am I lying? You get one of them fastballs, about waist high, over the outside corner of the plate where you can get the meat of the bat on it...and good god! You can kiss it goodbye. Now, am I lying?

Aunt Esther: You think you supposed to know everything. Life is a mystery. Don't you know life is a mystery? I see you still trying to figure it out. It ain't all for you to know. It's all an adventure. That's all life is. But you got to trust that adventure.

And I began to let him go. Hour by hour. Days into months. It was a physical sensation, like letting out the string of a kite. Except that the string was coming from my center.

Do not wait for the healing to arrive. It will never come. The holes will never leave or be filled with anything at all. But holes are interesting things.

Acceptance, when it comes, arrives in waves: Listen with your chest. You will feel a pendulum swing within you, favoring one direction or another. And that is your answer. The answer is always inside your chest. The right choice weighs more. That's how you know. It causes you to lean in its direction.

In the opening to the Mary Tyler Moore Show Mary's in the supermarket, hurrying through the aisles. She pauses at the meat case, picks up a steak and checks the price. Then rolls her eyes, shrugs and tosses it in the cart. That's kind of how I feel. Sure I would have liked things to be different. But, 'roll of eyes' what can you do? 'shrug' I threw the meat in my cart and moved on.

Imperfections are attractive when their owners are happy with them.

You would be amazed by what you can give up, lose, or break, and yet still be a person who gets happy over brownies.

The past doesn't haunt us, we haunt the past.

No matter your spiritual beliefs, if you hold any, the answer is the same: sometimes, why is not knowable. If you open the refrigerator door and a tub of Kozy Shack tapioca pudding tumbles out and splats open onto the floor, you clean it. You don't stand there and question why it happened, how it was possible. Why doesn't matter now.

All improvements, transformations, achievements, liberations; everything you want to change about yourself and your life; everything you want to make happen, any obstacle you want to overcome, any crisis you must survive—the prerequisite is being able to allow yourself to feel whatever it is you feel and not pretend to feel something you don't.

But then, look at me. My brain is incorrectly formed, and I'm shaped like a tube. Plus, I'm an alcoholic, a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, was raised in a cult and have no education. So, really, if you think about it, the only thing that separates me from the guy with the stinky foot and no teeth is a book deal and some cologne.

If you're gay and live in New York and don't go to gym, eventually they come for you.

How the fuck did I get here? I thought. If I was going to be completely sober for the rest of my life, if I couldn't even have one drink at the end of a long and brittle day, then the life I lived needed to be a life from which I did not seek escape.

You would be amazed at what you can give up, lose or break and yet still be a person who gets happy over brownies.

Let the people who want to have kids, have them. And let the rest of us spend the extra money on ourselves. Being gay doesn't make you a bad person. Not wanting kids doesn't make you a bad person. Perhaps crushing the bones in one little girl's hand makes you a bad person, but that was an accident.

Do you understand that you are exactly attractive enough and thin enough (even if you weigh four hundred pounds) and smart enough and funny enough, even if you cannot tell a knock-knock joke without fucking it up? You are exactly everything enough to the person who thinks you are. Just like when you look at them, your eyes will get all wet and girly. Because of their beauty. Even if by any ordinary, reasonable standard, they're short and old and have bad skin.

This is the truest thing I know. Scars are nothing to hate, they are nothing to deny. They serve as our proof of what we survived, and there is nothing more beautiful than to have survived something.

A lack of "self-esteem" really suggests a feeling of shame over being one's self. Shame is the landfill emotion. It's not organic, like joy. It was dumped there by somebody else. A manipulation. Shame is very heavy, dense disappointment; somebody else's, in you. Inside of disappointment is a deeper judgment: Less than. Inferior. Defective.

In a way, I am a psychological transsexual, always trying to pass for a normal person but being clocked every time.

It's okay to like me, because I'm just like you." Everybody feels a bit like a dented can inside. Even the slickest, most polished person you can think of is more aware of their shortcomings and flaws than their talents and gifts.

for me it provided a kaleidoscopic view of everything that was wrong with me. I could already feel it opening all the windows in my hear, giving me a panoramic view of my flaws

Only by embracing all that you regret and not denying it, only by placing the highest value on what you've gained because of all you've lost, does regret lose the ability to cripple you.