Quotes About Acceptance

Breaking hips is for old people," Gertie said. "I have decided that I am middle-aged." "Ha!" Ida Belle said. "Middle-aged for what, a tortoise?

Regret, which is guilt without the neurosis, enables us ... to move forward instead of back.

As the acceptance of democracy brings a certain life-giving power, so it has its own sanctions and comforts. Perhaps the most obvious one is the curious sense which comes to us from time to time, that we belong to the whole, that a certain basic well being can never be taken away from us whatever the turn of fortune.

Surprizes are foolish things. The pleasure is not enhanced, and the inconvenience is often considerable.

I must learn to be content with being happier than I deserve.

I opened my mouth to do some calm explaining. "I'm gay." is what came out.

Why should one bother to criticize what is inevitable or challenge what is omnipotent?

I don't judge people by their bodies. Even when I was a young girl I liked men for their minds. Now that I'm middle-aged I see how right I was.

I always thought I should meet you. My cousin used to tell me how queer you were. I think, though, that you can make friends more quickly with queer people. Or else you don't make friends with them at all—one way or the other.

We don't need a melting pot in this country, folks. We need a salad bowl. In a salad bowl, you put in the different things. You want the vegetables — the lettuce, the cucumbers, the onions, the green peppers — to maintain their identity. You appreciate differences.

When you can't remember why you're hurt, that's when you're healed.

The challenge is not to be perfect…it's to be whole

We are not meant to be perfect; we are meant to be whole.

Nothing can change until we acknowledge what is, as I have learned over time.

He has not the faintest idea that I am ugly and we are very happy together.

Life, Steffi has learned, carries on around the pain, making room for it, absorbing it until it becomes part of the daily fabric, wrapping itself around you and lodging itself in your heart.

I feel like I don't have all the ingredients a person is supposed to have.

It must be strange to keep your strong mind in a body that grows older and weaker and no longer resembles your own image of yourself.

methods of obedience is to learn to accept food from my hand. Controlling her primal needs will help me train her to my satisfaction

I thought I would love you forever—and, a little, I may, in the way I still move toward a crate, knees bent, or reach for a man: as one might stretch for the three or four fruit that lie in the sun at the top of the tree; too ripe for any moment but this, they open their skin at first touch, yielding sweetness, sweetness and heat, and in me, each time since, the answering yes.

The work of existence devours its own unfolding. What dissolves will dissolve-- you, reader, and I, and all our quick angers and longings.

You work with what you are given, the red clay of grief, the black clay of stubbornness going on after.

The heart's reasons seen clearly, even the hardest will carry its whip-marks and sadness and must be forgiven. As the drought-starved eland forgives the drought-starved lion who finally takes her, enters willingly then the life she cannot refuse, and is lion, is fed, and does not remember the other. So few grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance. The world asks of us only the strength we have and we give it. Then it asks more, and we give it.

Here is a soul, accepting nothing.