Quotes About Acceptance

I think this is / the prettiest world—so long as you don't mind / a little dying

Tell me about despair, yours, I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on.

For years and years I struggled just to love my life. And then the butterfly rose, weightless, in the wind. "Don't love your life too much," it said, and vanished into the world.

I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame.

Things take the time they take.

Perhaps some things should remain mysteries and are better kept in our hearts. We should not try to explain them. (p. 86)

No one is excluded from the astronaut corps based on penis size.

Breast milk and amniotic fluid carry the flavors of the mother's foods, and studies consistently show that babies grow up to be more accepting of flavors they've sampled while in the womb and while breastfeeding.

Not that there's anything wrong with just lying around on your back. In it's way, rotting is interesting too, as we will see. It's just that there are other ways to spend your time as a cadaver.

I find the dead easier to be around than the dying. They are not in pain, not afraid of death. There are no awkward silences and conversations that dance around the obvious. They aren't scary...Cadavers, once you get used to them--and you do that quite fast--are surprisingly easy to be around.

When you get right down to it, there is no dignified way to go, be it decomposition, incineration, dissection, tissue digestion, or composting. They're all, bottom line, a little disagreeable. It takes the careful application of a well-considered euphemism—burial, cremation, anatomical gift-giving, water reduction, ecological funeral—to bring it to the point of acceptance.

The flesh gives no resistance and yields no blood.

People like what they eat, rather than eat what they like." The phenomenon starts early. Breast milk and amniotic fluid carry the flavors of the mother's foods, and studies consistently show that babies grow up to be more accepting of flavors they've sampled while in the womb and while breastfeeding. (Babies swallow several ounces of amniotic fluid a day.)

Death. It doesn't have to be boring.

I have a list of party guests in my desk drawer that dates from around 1997. Every so often I take it out and add the people we've met, cross off the couples that have moved away, and then put it back in my drawer. I long ago came to accept that we're never actually going to have this party; we're just going to keep updating the list—which, for people like me, is a party all by itself.

An hour? What do you do with a dead person for an hour? Mom had been sick for a long time; we'd done our grieving and crying and saying goodbye. It was like being served a slice of pie you didn't want to eat. We felt it would be rude to leave, after all the trouble they'd gone to.

On Wednesday, September 3, I'd been awake at five in the morning for an interview with Charles Gibson on Good Morning, America. Apparently, I still hadn't accepted Diana's death because at the end of our talk Charles observed, "It's wonderful to hear you speaking about her in the present tense. Do you realize you've been doing that?" I hadn't been aware of this at all.

I am alone and miserable. Only someone as ugly as I am could love me.

once I falsely hoped to meet the beings who, pardoning my outward form, would love me for the excellent qualities which I was capable of unfolding.

One as deformed and horrible as myself, could not deny herself to me. My companion must be of the same species, and have the same defects... with whom I can live in the interchange of those sympathies necessary for my being...

Justine shook her head mournfully. I do not fear to die, she said; that pang is past. God raises my weakness and gives me courage to endure the worst. I leave a sad and bitter world; and if you remember me and think of me as of one unjustly condemned, I am resigned to the fate awaiting me. Learn from me, dear lady, to submit in patience to the will of heaven!

I am satisfied: miserable wretch! you have determined to live, and I am satisfied.

I leave a sad and bitter world; and if you remember me, and think of me as of one unjustly condemned, I am resigned to the fate awaiting me.

It is so long before the mind can persuade itself that she, whom we saw every day, and whose very existence appeared a part of our own, can have departed for ever.