Quotes About Acceptance

The lost soul whose heart reaches out to grasp love While his arms were forced through precedent to hang lifeless Whose very soul cries out to a love that cannot be returned Where can a substitute, a partial relief be found? How can a futureless life go on? Yet, it does. Year after year, the body lives, while the soul dies.

The orgy room at Dave's Baths was democracy made flesh; race and social standing were checked at the door along with clothes.

Everybody is Other in Maupin.

In the new style, homosexuals and heterosexuals could be equally unhappy, equally happy, and equally screwed up.

You never hear the bomb that's got your name on it.

The closer you are to death, the more attached you become to life

Mr May, you reach a certain age when you don't have enemies any more, just people who find you mildly annoying.

I think growing older affects you in one of two ways,' said May. 'Either you sink into a state of perpetual fury, or you cease to get angry about anyone or anything. You make your peace with the world, and I want some peace.

The past is a weight that can end up crushing your life.

I do not deny my past. I have been a great wanderer from what is right, but at least I know it and hope that the knowledge has not come too late.

Each generation ... rescues a new area from what its predecessors arrogantly and snobbishly dismissed as 'the lunatic fringe.

The child is father to the man" is a Romantic riddle that turns worldly hierarchy on its head. It means that the child is in some sense the superior of the man; the child is wiser than the man. Ironically, the eventual broad acceptance of this truth did not so much liberate the Victorian bourgeois as it haunted them and gave them a bad conscience. They sensed that the poets were right.

You should be nicer to him,' a schoolmate had once said to me of some awfully ill-favored boy. 'He has no friends.' This, I realized with a pang of pity that I can still remember, was only true as long as everybody agreed to it.

In one way, I suppose, I have been in denial for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely that reason, I can't see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it's all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me.

Nihil humanum a me alienum puto, said the Roman poet Terence: 'Nothing human is alien to me.' The slogan of the old Immigration and Naturalization Service could have been the reverse: To us, no aliens are human.

A melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realisation that you can't make old friends.

So far, I have decided to take whatever my disease can throw at me, and to stay combative even while taking the measure of my inevitable decline. I repeat, this is no more than what a healthy person has to do in slower motion. It is our common fate. In either case, though, one can dispense with facile maxims that don't live up to their apparent billing.

Joseph Heller knew how the need to belong, and the need for security, can make people accept lethal and stupid conditions, and then act as if they had imposed them on themselves.

I would be quite content to go to their children's bar mitzvahs, to marvel at their Gothic cathedrals, to 'respect' their belief that the Koran was dictated, though exclusively in Arabic, to an illiterate merchant, or to interest myself in Wicca and Hindu and Jain consolations. And as it happens, I will continue to do this without insisting on the polite reciprocal condition - which is that they in turn leave me alone. But this, religion is ultimately incapable of doing.

In the early days of the December that my father was to die, my younger brother brought me the news that I was a Jew. I was then a transplanted Englishman in America, married, with one son and, though unconsoled by any religion, a nonbelieving member of two Christian churches. On hearing the tidings, I was pleased to find that I was pleased.

Death has this much to be said for it: You don't have to get out of bed for it. Wherever you happen to be They bring it to you — free.

In one way, I suppose, I have been "in denial" for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely that reason, I can't see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it's all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me.

To the dumb question Why me? the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: why not?

As I look back on my long and arduous struggle to make myself over, and on my dismaying recent glimpses of lost babyhood, I am more than ever sure that it's enough to be born once, and to take one's chances, and to grow old disgracefully.