top of page
"Did she say anything before she died?" he asked."Yes," the surgeon said. "She said, 'Forgive him'""Forgive him?" my father asked."I think she was referring to the drunk driver who killed her."Wow.My grandmother's last act on earth was a call for forgiveness, love and tolerance.She wanted us to forgive Gerald, the dumb-ass Spokane Indian alcoholic who ran her over and killed her.I think My Dad wanted to go find Gerald and beat him to death.I think my mother would have helped him.I think I would have helped him, too.But my grandmother wanted us to forgive her murderer.Even dead, she was a better person than us."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Forgiveness quotes

"Forgive everyone. Forgive every misery and misfortune with love."

"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."

"Don't allow unforgiveness to make you unhappy."

"Although every person makes mistakes, not every mistake makes a person."

"If we really want to learn how to forgive, perhaps we had better start with something easier than the Gestapo."

"It became clear to him that all the dreadful evil he had been witnessing in prisons and jails and the quiet self-satisfaction of the perpetrators of this evil were the consequences of men trying to do what was impossible; trying to correct evil while being evil themselves...Now he saw clearly what all the terrors he had seen came from, and what ought to be done to put a stop to them. The answer he could not find was the same that Christ gave to Peter. It was that we should forgive always an infinite number of times because there are no men who have not sinned themselves, and therefore none can punish or correct others."

"She would not allow herself to remember how Note had treated her, and many others too, she suspected. She had forgiven him, yes, but she still did not like to remember. And perhaps a deliberate act of forgetting went along with forgiveness. You forgave, and then you said to yourself: Now I shall forget. Because if you did not forget, then your forgiveness would be tested, perhaps many times and in ways that you could not resist, and you might go back to anger, and to hating."

"Let go of the mistakes and the sins of others. You'll have plenty of time to make your own mistakes, the rest of your life to commit your own sins."

"We were so little when you took away all our sins."

"Vengeance and forgiveness are about reconciling the accounts, but accounting is an ugly description of the tangled ways we're connected. I sometimes think everything comes out even in the end, but an end that arches beyond the horizon, beyond our capacity to perceive or measure, and that in many cases those who trespass against you do so out of a misery that means the punishment preceded and even precipitated the crime. Maybe that's acceptance."
Explore more quotes by Sherman Alexie

"Everyone I have lost in the closing of a doorthe click of the lockis not forgotten, theydo not die but remainwithin the soft edgesof the earth, the ashof house fires and cancerin sin and forgivenesshuddled under old blanketsdreaming their way intomy hands, my heartclosing tight like fists."

"What if someone picks on me?" I askedThen I'll pick on them".What if someone picks my nose?" I asked.The I'll pick your nose, too" Rowdy said."

"I'm quite aware of my differences. I wouldn't classify them as weird."

"Gay people were seen as magical, too. I mean, like in many cultures, men were viewed as warriors and women were viewed as caregivers. But gay people, being both male and female, were seen as both warriors and caregivers. Gay people could do anything. They were like Swiss Army knives!"

"Then she tells me that Jesus isstill herebecause Jesus wasonce here.And parts of Jesus arestill floating in the air.She tells me Jesus' DNA ispart of the collective DNA.She tells we are all partof Jesus, we are all Jesus in part.She tells me to breathe deepduring all our stormsbecause you can sometimes taste Jesusin a good, hard rain."
bottom of page