Quotes About Acceptance

To accept one's past-- one's history--is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it.

You want to leave Giovanni because he makes you stink. You want to despise Giovanni because he is not afraid of the stink of love. You want to kill him in the name of all your lying little moralities. And you—you are immoral. You are, by far, the most immoral man I have met in all my life. Look, look what you have done to me. Do you think you could have done this if I did not love you? Is this what you should do to love?

It is a terrible thing, simply, to be trapped in one's history, and attempt, in the same motion (and in this, our life!) to accept, deny, reject, and redeem it--and, also, on whatever level, to profit from it.

I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be "accepted" by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don't wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet

It will all be the same, only I will be stiller

And if the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.

Our humanity is our burden, our life. We need not battle for it. We need only to do what is infinitely more difficult: that is, accept it.

Not everything that is face can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

I've got to accept limitations before I can discover my possibilities.

Anyway, Giovanni's Room is not really about homosexuality. It's the vehicle through which the book moves. Go Tell It on the Mountain, for example, is not about a church, and Giovanni is not really about homosexuality. It's about what happens to you if you're afraid to love anybody. Which is much more interesting than the question of homosexuality.

Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

Not everything that is faced can be changed but nothing can be changed unless it is faced.

A man grows up when he looks back, realizes what has happened to him, accepts it all, and begins to change himself. He cannot grow up until he reaches this moment and passes it. We are now at the end of our extraordinarily prolonged adolescence. A very great poet, an American, Miss Marianne Moore, wrote, many years ago, the following description of our terrors: The weak overcomes its menace. The strong overcomes itself.

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense once the hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.

She knew that he was going to leave her. It was in his walk, his talk, his eyes. He wanted to go. He had already moved back, crouching to leap. And she had no rival. He was not going to another woman. He simply wanted to go. It would happen today, tomorrow, three weeks from today; it was over, she could do nothing about it; neither could she save herself by jumping first.

You accept life as it is, you see it as it is before you can change it.

I doubt that Americans will ever be able to face the fact that the word 'homosexual' is not a noun. The root of this word, as Americans use it — or, as this word uses Americans — simply involves a terror of any human touch, since any human touch can change you.

Look, men have been sleeping with men for thousands of years—and raising tribes. This is a Western sickness, it really is. It's an artificial division. Men will be sleeping with each other when the trumpet sounds. It's only this infantile culture which has made such a big deal of it.

Everyone wishes to be loved, but, in the event, nearly no one can bear it. Everyone desires love but also finds it impossible to believe that he deserves it.

That's what the Blues and Spirituals are all about. It is the ability to look on things as they are and survive your losses, or even not survive them—to know that your losses are coming. To know they are coming is the only possible insurance you have, a faint insurance, that you will survive them.

We must take our friends as they are.

People never want to be told anything they do not believe already.

That's what makes death so hard—unsatisfied curiosity. —BERYL MARKHAM

A man who can laugh at himself is truly blessed, for he will never lack for amusement.