Quotes About Acceptance

Boy needs to get a good night's sleep. Otherwise, he'll be lucky to get accepted at SUNY-So Far Upstate You Might As Well Be In Canada, eh ?

No. I can't change. I shouldn't change.

Lily was mittens and hot chocolate and snow angels that lifted from the ground and danced in the air. She said she loved winter, and I wondered if there was any season she didn't love. I worked hard to accept her enthusiasm as genuine. My mental furnace was built for immolation, not warmth. I didn't understand how she could be so happy. But such was the love I had fallen into that I decided not to question it, and to live within it.

No—when the rain falls you just let it fall and you grin like a madman and you dance with it, because if you can make yourself happy in the rain then you're doing pretty alright in life.

Because I don't want to," I said. "Not because of the way she is now—I know that's not what she's like. There was no way it was going to be as easy as the notebook. I get that now.

The pill's bittersweet chaser is not that they can't love you back the same way. It's that they won't. They won't open their minds to the possibility. They won't expand their expectations of romantic love past their own predetermined boundaries—gender, age, [insert innumerable other unfair, random reasons here].

love is love, attraction is what it is, and why should the arbitrary assignment of genital parts determine whether or not you want to be with a person?

It's definitely worth something," I said. "A lot. We still don't know each other, right? And I'll admit—I thought it might be best if we kept it all to the page, passed that notebook back and forth until we were ninety. But clearly that wasn't meant to be. And who am I to blow against the wind?

I feel like I know her. Really know her. And part of really knowing her is also knowing that I don't necessarily know her as well as I think I do. Which is okay. We should each have our own damn souls.

Why do you lie I ask her. To block the truth. Fair enough. Naomi goes on. Where did we get it in our heads that we need truth all the time? Sometimes lies are nice, you know? You don't have to know the truth all the time. It's too exhausting.

Why do this work?" His reply: "It's practice for death, learning how to surrender to the unknown prepares us for our own experience of dying without fear.

Life is muddy. Denying that—thinking there's only one noble path above the fray—can be a poisonous approach to life.

He gave a hum of recognition. 1657. The early days of the readmission of Jews to England, after nearly four centuries of official expulsion.

They just want to be liked. Being liked is their . . . sugar rush.

They would work together in pursuit of whatever it was their lot to discover. He didn't like her. But neither did he pity her. At least there was that.

Wounding and healing are not opposites. They're part of the same thing. It is our wounds that enable us to be compassionate with the wounds of others. It is our limitations that make us kind to the limitations of other people. It is our loneliness that helps us to to find other people or to even know they're alone with an illness. I think I have served people perfectly with parts of myself I used to be ashamed of.

Perhaps the most important thing we bring to another person is the silence in us, not the sort of silence that is filled with unspoken criticism or hard withdrawal. The sort of silence that is a place of refuge, of rest, of acceptance of someone as they are. We are all hungry for this other silence. It is hard to find. In its presence we can remember something beyond the moment, a strength on which to build a life. Silence is a place of great power and healing.

Perhaps wisdom is simply a matter of waiting, and healing a question of time. And anything good you've ever been given is yours forever.

Every great loss demands that we choose life again. We need to grieve in order to do this. The pain we have not grieved over will always stand between us and life. When we don't grieve, a part of us becomes caught in the past like Lot's wife who, because she looked back, was turned into a pillar of salt.

How strange to think that great pain may be impermanent. Something in us all seems to want to carve it in granite, as if only this would do full honor to its terrible significance. But even pain is blessed with impermanence... p 259

In the Big Apple, you get people like Beth on every bus, and nobody would say a word. You get races mixing, and it's no big deal. Old people, young people, everyone keeps their mouth shut. There's just more tolerance there.

I lost myself, but in the end that helped me find myself. You've just got to have faith and work at it." "With anything?" I ask. "Anything," she says, as a gap finally opens in the intersection. "As long as you accept the hardest thing of all: that you might have to lose to win.

She's sad in the way Laura wears glasses and Max has freckles and Beth is retarded. There's no reason, it's just the way it is.

You're neither unnatural, nor abominable, nor mad; you're as much a part of what people call nature as anyone else; only you're unexplained as yet -- you've not got your niche in creation. ~ The Well of Loneliness, 1928