Quotes About Acceptance

The oracle has spoken. But for me, already old age is my companion

Learn humility, while there's yet time--': those were the last of the abbot's words he had waited to hear. All very well, he thought, to be humble in accepting one's own pain and deprivation, perhaps, but what right have I, what right has he, to make a virtue of meekness when it will be Adam who suffers? I call that cheap humility.

It was too late for happiness - but not too late to be helped by the thought of what I had missed. That is all I haved lived on - don't take it from me now

What did it matter where she came from, or whose child she was, when love was dancing in her veins?

life makes ugly faces at us sometimes, I know.

His life, for years past, had been mainly a succession of resigned adaptations, and he had learned, before dealing practically with his embarrassments, to extract from most of them a small tribute of amusement. (The Triumph Of The Night)

She rose too, not as if to meet him or to flee from him, but quietly, as though the worst of the task were done and she had only to wait; so quietly that, as he came close, her outstretched hands acted not as a check but as a guide to him.

But I've caught it already. I am dead — I've been dead for months and months.

For the first time he was face to face with his hovering dread: he was judging where he still adored.

He was not blind to her crudity and her limitations, but they were a part of her grace and her persuasion. Diverse et ondoyante—so he had seen her from the first.

You mean, I suppose, that society here is not as brilliant? You're right, I daresay; but we belong here, and people should respect our ways when they come among us. Ellen Olenska especially: she came back to get away from the kind of life people lead in brilliant societies.

It's all stupid and narrow and unjust—but one can't make over society.

That was the way of the world they lived in. Nobody questioned, nobody wondered any more-because nobody had time to remember.

What was the use of being beautiful and attracting attention if one were perpetually doomed to relapse again into the obscure mass of the Uninvited?

She had once shown him the impossibility of such a hope, and his subsequent behaviour seemed to prove that he had accepted the situation with a reasonableness somewhat mortifying to her vanity.

But is has happened, you know. Bear that in mind. Nothing you can do will change it. Time and again, I've found that a good thing to remember.

Custom reconciles us to every thing.

I know there is an order that keeps things fast in their place: it is made to us, and we are made to it. Why not ask another wife, other children, another body, another mind?

It's hard to evaluate the validity of a belief you're scarcely aware of—you just accept it as is.

LOOK NOW, IN YOUR IGNORANCE, ON THE FACE OF DEATH.

I knew I was worthless and at the same time I was convinced somebody would find me worthy, would worship me for this sexual allure so foreign to my understanding yet so central to my being.

The best explanation of masochism, the appeal of masochism, is that it accepts shame; the sickening shame one must swallow and hide is at last accepted, employed, even loved—the shame about a mutilation, hairiness, too much or not enough fat, the shame about wanting to serve, to be a dog, son, wife, slave, horse, prisoner.

As a Buddhist I was determined to root out all desires, including especially my "sick" desire for other boys and men. Only through ridding myself of all "hankerings" could I achieve nirvana and escape the endless cycle of rebirth. The odd thing is that the transmigration of the soul from one body (old and ailing) into another (a happy baby's) didn't sound so bad—in fact, it was what most Americans longed for.

I could certainly subscribe to the notion that life ends in old age, sickness, and death—but later, later.