Quotes About Acceptance

Discrimination is training in not identifying or empathizing with someone because they are different in some way, in believing the differences mean everything and common humanity nothing.

A better world, yes; a perfect world, never.

the outsiders stick together because their differences from each other are insignificant in the face of their differences from a hostile mainstream.

But ignorance is one form of tolerance, whether it's pretending we live in a colorblind society or one in which misogyny is some quaint old thing we've gotten over.

When a corporation writes something off, it accepts the cost. When we write off corporations as inherently corrupt, we accept the cost, too.

A Presbyterian pastor who had performed a number of such marriages told me, "I remember coming to this realization when I was meeting with same-sex couples before performing their ceremonies when it was legal in California. The old patriarchal default settings did not apply in their relationships, and it was a glorious thing to witness.

Ernest Hemingway is also in my non-read zone, because if you learn a lot from Gertrude Stein, you shouldn't be a homophobic, antisemitic misogynist.

Tobin James Mueller: 'No one is turned away, my one rule. I never say no. That's one of the reasons it became a utopia.

With red-rimmed eyes and a wavering voice, he said, "I want you to know that I am sorry. I'm sorry it's taken me so long to understand this." I held the gaze of a man softened by humility, and gently said, "It's all right. You are here now. It's not too late." Change happens gradually, then suddenly. It's never too late to be part of the social movement that will help heal our world.

There is a serenity in illness that takes away all the need to do and makes just being enough. In

when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.

Nobody gets over anything; time doesn't heal any wounds; if he stopped loving her today, as one of George Jones's most famous songs has it, it's because he's dead.

Had I visited at an earlier hour she would have found fault with something I'd done when I was with her. And had I not given her a copy, another failure could be charted. There was no winning, just some decisions about how to lose and how not to play.

People like us, Rose, we just want to live happy quiet lives, don't we? Little house. Enough to eat... That was all he'd wanted. And Rose wished with all her heart he could have had it. But she knew now that you can't change the past. It doesn't mean you have to forget it, but you can't change it and you can't stay there.

As Sidda joined Vivi in staring out into the darkness of the fields, where hundreds of sunflowers grew, she thought: I will never fully know my mother, any more than I will ever know my father or Connor, or myself. I have been missing the point. The point is not knowing another person, or learning to love another person. The point is simply this: how tender can we bear to be? What good manners can we show as we welcome ourselves and others into our hearts?

I wish I knew then what I know now - and still had those thighs!

you do not have too many boogeymen for me. You have just the right number.

The words shot through Vivi's bones and blood and muscle, and her body relaxed, so that when her feet touched the ground they met the earth differently, as though they had found roots that reached deep down and anchored to something tender and undamaged.

You don't get no trophies for livin the life you born into. It just be your job, and you lucky if you can do the work set out in front of you and not fret if it seem puny. Chaney, Little Altars Everywhere

Tears will do you no good.

The point is not knowing another person, or learning to love another person. The point is simply this: how tender can we bear to be? What good manners can we show as we welcome ourselves and others in our hearts?

saw that pain is part of beauty—that inside of all that music, all that love, all the moonlight and sunlight, are shafts of pain, and we are meant to bear it all.

Life is short, but it is wide. This too shall pass.

sadness we did not have to work on. It came, as sadness usually does, as soon as I sat down and began to listen. The small press had a correspondingly