I regret everything because it has just finished, and already when I was twelve, I lamented the time that had gone by. Even in the best of spirits, it’s always been as though I wrestle with the present in a vain effort to stop its becoming the past.
While people argue with one another about the specifics of Freud’s work and blame him for the prejudices of his time, they overlook the fundamental truth of his writing, his grand humility: that we frequently do not know our own motivations in life and are prisoners to what we cannot understand.
You don’t think in depression that you’ve put on a gray veil and are seeing the world through the haze of a bad mood. You think that the veil has been taken away, the veil of happiness, and that now you’re seeing truly.
Fold the worst events of your life into a narrative of triumph.
We cannot bear a pointless torment, but we can endure great pain if we believe that it’s purposeful.
The absence of marriages will result in all kinds of financial burdens that gay people wouldn’t face if they could get married.
The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, and it was vitality that seemed to seep away from me in that moment.
A sense of humor is the best indicator that you will recover; it is often the best indicator that people will love you. Sustain that and you have hope.
I believe that words are strong, that they can overwhelm what we fear when fear seems more awful than life is good.
I think an awful lot of the diplomatic problems that exist in the world come from people assuming that their society is the one with a purchase on truth.
I can see the beauty of glass objects fully at the moment when they slip from my hand.
It is nearly impossible to hate anyone whose story you know.
Life is enriched by difficulty; love is made more acute when it requires exertion.
Despair is part of love.
I was overpowered by being in the world, by other people and their lives I couldn’t lead, their jobs I couldn’t do – overpowered even by jobs I would never want or need to do.
The world changed, and the idea of having a family became feasible for homosexuals. But I was still left with the question as to what it would be like for a child to grow up with gay parents.
I look at the rates of suicide among gay teens. They are so, so high for suicide attempts and for completed suicides.
Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair.
When you banish the dragons you banish the heroes.
When you believe that you cannot stitch your own heart back together, go to work on the hearts of other people; there is no surer way to repair yourself than to repair them.