Quotes About Acceptance

This is the art of courage: to see things as they are and still believe that the victory lies not with those who avoid the bad, but those who taste, in living awareness, every drop of the good.

The truth is not always easy to accept, but it is always necessary. It is the foundation of trust, the cornerstone of justice, and the key to unlocking the mysteries of the past. We must have the courage to face the truth, no matter how uncomfortable, and to embrace it as a catalyst for growth and change (Kneubuhl 101)

The truth is not always easy to accept, but it is always necessary. It is the foundation of trust, the cornerstone of justice, and the key to unlocking the mysteries of the past. We must have the courage to face the truth, no matter how uncomfortable, and to embrace it as a catalyst for growth and change (Kneubuhl 51)

Another reason it's dangerous to acknowledge that you were unloved is that it implies the possibility that your mother may have been right-you are unlovable.

Integral to being emotionally healthy is to have a mother who has the ability to respect her child's differences and not perceive them as betrayals.

Most people can recall schoolyard confrontations with with bullies. Boys were expected to deal with them by standing their ground and slugging it out, even, as one man told me, "if you knew you were going to get your head bashed in. You had to show you could take it, and you'd die rather than cry." But for girls, the surest and safest way to avoid being picked on or terrorized is to get the bully to like you.

Anger is the first step toward emotional healing.

My weakness for sympathizing with others has much to do with my status as a bastard, which is not to say that being a bastard naturally predisposes one to sympathy. Many bastards behave like bastards, and I credit my gentle mother with teaching me the idea that blurring the lines between us and them can be a worthy behavior.

Like all good students, I yearned for nothing but approval, even from fools.

For her, he swallowed the black tea of exile.

Even if refugees, undocumented immigrants, and legal immigrants are not all potential billionaires, that is no reason to exclude them. Even if their fate is to be the high-school dropout and the fast-food cashier, so what? That makes them about as human as the average American, and we are not about to deport the average American (are we?).

We instinctively knew that in order for Americans to find refugees like us acceptable, they first had to find our food digestible (not to mention affordable and pronounceable).

No wonder, then, that I was drawn to the General, who, like my friends Man and Bon, never sneered about my muddled heritage. Upon selecting me for his staff, the General said, The only thing I'm interested in is how good you are at what you do, even if the things I ask you to do may not be so good. I

I cannot be the only one who believes that if others just saw who I really was, then I would be understood and, perhaps, loved. But what would happen if one took off the mask and the other saw one not with love but with horror, disgust, anger? What if the self that one exposes is as unpleasing to others as the mask, or even worse?

In the end, my father had it right. He called me nothing at all.

I cannot be the only one who believes that if others just saw who I really was, then I would be understood and, perhaps, loved.

No, just as my abused generation was divided before birth, so was I divided on birth, delivered into a postpartum world where hardly anyone accepted me for who I was, but only ever bullied me into choosing between my two sides. This was not simply hard to do no, it was truly impossible, for how I choose me againse myself?

The father of one of the dead children cried, My God, why are You doing this to us? And it struck us all then, the answer to humanity's eternal question of Why? It was, and is, simply this: Why not?

Ah, the Amerasian, forever caught between worlds and never knowing where he belongs! Imagine if you did not suffer from the confusion you must constantly experience, feeling the constant tug-of-war inside you and over you, between Orient and Occident.

I lay down and imagined we slumbered like soldiers even though the only place near Chinatown where one could buy bunk beds was the children's section of gaudy furniture stores, overseen by Mexicans or people who looked like Mexicans. I could not tell anyone from the Southern Hemisphere apart but assumed they would take no offense, given that they themselves called me Chino to my face.

My brother went to Harvard seven years after arriving in the States with no English. I won the Pulitzer Prize. We could be put on a poster touting how refugees make America great. And we do. But it shouldn't take this kind of success to be welcomed. Even if refugees, undocumented immigrants, and legal immigrants are not all potential billionaires, that is no reason to exclude them.

The average person of any race was not good-looking, but while the ugliness of others only confirmed prejudices, the homeliness of one's own people was always comforting.

I am a refugee, an American, and a human being, which is important to proclaim, as there are many who think these identities cannot be reconciled.

Can you join, ask sincerely for affection without sweaty hand of expectation, understanding and accepting if it never is given?