Quotes About Acceptance

Hour after hour, my father lay unmoving and worked his way toward death; but when he yawned, the yawn was his. And his body, wasted though it was, was likewise still radiantly his.

What's it do?" she said. "Absolutely nothing," Hibbard replied, "if you are in perfect mental health. However, let's face it, who is?

Clem didn't know a man who worked more passionately for social justice than his father, and when you really loved someone, the whole person, you simply accepted the little things you might have wished were different. He could see eyes being rolled when his father waxed religious at a fellowship meeting, but Becky herself rolled her eyes like that. It didn't mean she didn't love him.

He could see the desired outcomes, the drowning at sea, the shotgun blast, the plunge from a height, so near to him still that he refused to believe he had lost the opportunity to avail himself of their relief.

Life hasn't signed a contract with you promising to give you everything you want. It just unfolds in its own mysterious and uncontrollable way. The more you stop resisting the way things are, the happier and more peaceful you'll be.

Happiness, Buddha once said, is actually quite simple: The secret is to want what you have and not want what you don't have. Simple

At the age of eighty-three he had the self-awareness necessary to be patient with other people, but not always the facility to disguise the effort.

Viv used to say there were two types of person in life, past tense and present tense. Viv had seen herself as a present-tense person, which gave her an excuse never to discuss what she felt about a thing that had already happened.

Anyway, it struck me now in a different light, as being yet another bit of personal meaning which had ben taken from me, stripped off like clothes I'd only borrowed or stolen. I had maybe the least persuasive case for self-pity of any human soul on the planet. Or anyway, the most hilarious.

Everyone's body betrayed them in different ways, it was all forgiven and never discussed.

Closure isn't closure until someone's ready to close the door.

The test of faith is whether I can make space for difference. Can I recognize God's image in someone who is not in my image, who language, faith, ideal, are different from mine? If I cannot, then I have made God in my image instead of allowing him to remake me in his.

The mistakes I've made are dead to me. But I can't take back the things I never did.

The bruises go away, and so does how you hate, and so does the feeling that everything you receive from life is something you have earned.

In the end, everyone loses everyone. There was no invention to get around that, and so I felt, that night, like the turtle that everything else in the universe was on top of.

The only way to overcome sadness is to consume it.

There's nothing wrong with not understanding yourself.

Even if I don't like what I am, I know what I am. My children like what they are, but they don't know what they are. So tell me which is worse.

I can forgive you for leaving, but not for coming back.

I think it's very pretty. Can it be pretty if no one thinks it's pretty? I think it's pretty. If you're the only one? That's pretty pretty. And what about the boys? Don't you want them to think you're pretty? I wouldn't want a boy to think I was pretty unless he was the kind of boy who thought I was pretty.

I try not to remember the life that I didn't want to lose but lost and have to remember

If I'd been someone else in a different world I'd've done something different, but I was myself and the world was the world, so I was silent.

Love itself became the object of her love. She loved herself in love, she loved loving love, as love loves loving, and was able, in that way, to reconcile herself with a world that fell so short of what she would have hoped for.

We need much bigger pockets I thought as I lay in my bed counting off the seven minutes that it takes a normal person to fall asleep. We need enormous pockets pockets big enough for our families and our friends and even the people who aren't on our lists people we've never met but still want to protect. We need pockets for borough and for cities a pocket that could hold the universe.