forgiveness

It seems we need someone to know us as we are--with all we have done--and forgive us. We need to tell. We need to be whole in someone's sight: Know this about me, and yet love me. Please. ...for...others it seems there must be a person to redeem us to ourselves. It isn't enough, apparently, to know oneself. To forgive oneself in secret.

Sometimes we wait too long for the forgiveness of our fathers.

I forgive him and like water draining from the sand after a wave, the power he held over me disappears. A slow smile rises on my face.

He was gone and did not have time to tell him what I had just now realized: that I forgave him, and that she forgave us, and that we had to forgive to survive in the labyrinth.

I want hard stories, I demand them from myself. Hard stories are worth the difficulty. It seems to me the only way I have forgiven anything, understood anything, is through that process of opening up to my own terror and pain and reexamining it, re-creating it in the story, and making it something different, making it meaningful - even if the meaning is only in the act of the telling.

Richard Nixon was a serial collector of resentments.

Holding on to weight (i.e. anger, bitterness, the past, hatred) will not only hold you back, but also block your blessings. You've got to let some things go to move forward.

Forgiveness is a gift we can only give to ourselves.

Sometimes... the first step to forgiveness is realizing that the other person... is batshit crazy.

Forgiveness is freedom. It's something you do for yourself - to keep who you are intact. Now that I think about it - in some ways, it's kind of a selfish act.

Lay down an unforgiving spirit, because there'll be no peace until you do.

It was about grace, she decides, something that has been missing from her own life. ... She wants to be the kind of person who can bestow unearned kindness on another, replace bitterness with empathy, forgive only for the sake of forgiving.

...when you hate someone so much, a part of you wants desperately to forgive them. But you can't decide if it's because you really want, or if you just want to stop hating. I still don't know if forgiveness is generous or selfish. Maybe both.

Life is not a series of pathetic, meaningles actions. Some of them are so far from pathetic, so far from meaningless as to be beyond reason, maybe beyond forgiveness.

And be aware that people fall under one of two categories: they are either your brother and sister in faith, or they are your counterpart in humanity.

The one who forgives never brings up the past to that person's face. When you forgive, it's like it never happened. True forgiveness is complete and total.

Every time you ask for forgiveness, you recognize that the biggest problems you face in life exist inside of you, not outside of you.

There is no point in burying the hatchet if you're going to put up a marker on the site.