Quotes About Acceptance

They deny reality because the implications of that reality are, quite simply, unthinkable.

I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain. —JAMES BALDWIN Notes of a Native Son, 1955

We talked about what it means to love without judgment, to treasure something with all its imperfections. To see the beauty in the flaws, to stand in awe of the fragile, broken people we all are. That class was a night of deep compassion

I'm glad, I said, with an effort, refusing to let my mouth close up with jealousy. It wasn't that I wanted a husband and a baby; I didn't, or rather, I only wanted them the way I wanted to live to a hundred someday, far off, never thinking about the particulars. But they meant life: she was living, and I wasn't.

I had hated him, but I wouldn't have reproached him, any more than I would have reproached a bolt of lightning for striking my house. He wasn't a person . . .

I do not care if they do not like me, he said. Maybe then they will let me alone, and I will not have to stay in China. The thought visibly struck him, and his head came up with sudden enthusiasm. If I were very offensive, do you suppose they would go away now? he asked. Laurence, what would be particularly insulting Hammond looked like Pandora, the box open and horrors loose upon the world. Laurence was inclined to laugh, but he stifled it out of sympathy.

I've been taught any number of ways to manage anger, and they really work. What she's never been able to teach me is how to want to manage it. So I go on seething and raging and knowing the whole time that it's my own fault, because I do know how to stop.

I was back in comfortable plain skirts again, but they looked at me anyway as they went away, not with hostility, but not the way any of them would ever have looked at a woodcutter's girl from Dvernik. It was the way I had looked at Prince Marek, at first. They looked at me and saw someone out of a story, who might ride by and be stared at, but didn't belong in their lives at all.

I needn't be offended every time I have to look at you

And I want to help my family, I want to take care of them…but I can't be that girl. I can't be the smart girl. I can only be me.

You learn to feel it less, child; or you learn to love other things.

I was a glaring blot on the perfection. But I didn't care: I didn't feel I owed him beauty.

The river flows to the sea, whatever the wind says about it

I hated him and his silence ferociously: I knew he was only letting me convince myself there was nothing to be done.

and if they were both outcast for the same reason, they might at least have the pleasure of each other's society for compensation.

there is no sense your trying to put out sakura blossoms, when you are a bamboo.

Maybe he would let me come in, but he'd want to close the doors up again behind me.

I thought by then that maybe everything was all right because Panova Mandelstam was a mother. I didn't really understand what mothers were, because mine was in a tree, but I knew they were very good things and you were very angry

even grief had its limits

There's no such thing as normal people," I said, a desperate flailing. "There's just people, and some of them are miserable, and some of them are happy, and you've the same right to be happy as any of them—no more and no less.

So ask yourself, you swirling tornado of a human being, in a world of disoriented honeybees, do you want to look locked out the minute you sit down?

I'm still the kid dreaming of the lives she'll never have but guess what? Maybe she doesn't want them.

But we love you," my parents said. "We love you very much." I know, but they loved me as a girl. The boy within me was stuck with me. Not till much later did I find out that the boy within was really a girl.

How do you know if you are going to die?" I begged my mother. We had been traveling for days. With strange confidence she answered, "When you can no longer make a fist.