#accept

The difference between my darkness and your darkness is that I can look at my own badness in the face and accept its existence while you are busy covering your mirror with a white linen sheet. The difference between my sins and your sins is that when I sin I know I'm sinning while you have actually fallen prey to your own fabricated illusions. I am a siren, a mermaid; I know that I am beautiful while basking on the ocean's waves and I know that I can eat flesh and bones at the bottom of the sea. You are a white witch, a wizard; your spells are manipulations and your cauldron from hell yet you wrap yourself in white and wear a silver wig. ↗

— C. JoyBell C.

#fake #genuine #genuineness #goodness #hypocrisy

Through each crisis in my life, with acceptance and hope, in a single defining moment, I finally gained the courage to do things differently. ↗

— Sharon E. Rainey

#courage #crisis #moment #courage

Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it and it has not changed except to become more needed. The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, and their responsibilities have been decreed by our species... the writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit - for gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally flags of hope and of emulation. I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature. ↗

— John Steinbeck

#nobel #prize #speech #change

I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help a man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail. ↗

— William Faulkner

#courage

Let nothing human be foreign to me ↗

— Kate Christensen

#courage #embracing-life #courage

Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely. ↗

— Walt Whitman

#accept #here #i #me #same

It is not seen as insane when a fighter, under an attack that will inevitable lead to his death, chooses to take his own life first. In fact, this act has been encouraged for centuries, and is accepted even now as an honorable reason to do the deed. How is it any different when you are under attack by your own mind? ↗

— Emilie Autumn

#act #any #attack #been #centuries

Be calm. God awaits you at the door. ↗

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

#death-and-dying #serenity #death

I know my time will come soon enough, but I will not dwell on it. What is the purpose? We might as well dwell on the work of our teeth or on the mechanics of our walk. It is there, it will always be there, and I don't intend to spend my glorious hours looking over my shoulder to see death's icy face. ↗

— Alberto Manguel

#death #fear-of-death #living #living-well #death

If we would build on a sure foundation in friendship, we must love our friends for their sakes rather than for our own. ↗

— Charlotte Brontë

#friends #friendship #respect #friendship