The absence of words is the absence of intimacy. There are experiences that are starved for language.
Oppression breeds the power to oppose it.
I tend to find the ecstasy hidden in ordinary joys because I did not expect those joys to be ordinary to me.
I’m sure that if we had enough sophistication, someone could look at what my changes in brain structure were as I came to feel more deeply in love.
Suicide is a crime of loneliness, and adulated people can be frighteningly alone. Intelligence does not help in these circumstances; brilliance is almost always profoundly isolating.
It is easy to keep secrets by being honest in an ironic tone of voice.
We live in the right time, even if it doesn’t always feel like it.
I grew up in a very rationalist household. My father, in particular, came from that mid-century tradition of thinking science will ultimately explain everything.
I’m not studying everything that can go wrong. What I’m studying is how much love there can be, even when everything appears to be going wrong.
Identity itself should be not a smug label or a gold medal but a revolution.
Listen to the people who love you. Believe that they are worth living for even when you don’t believe it.
I had always thought of myself as fairly tough and fairly strong and fairly able to cope with anything. And then I had a series of personal losses. My mother died. A relationship that I was in came to end, and a variety of other things went awry.
Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance. It is tumbleweed distress that thrives on thin air, growing despite its detachment from the nourishing earth. It can be described only in metaphor and allegory.
The Church responds to antiquated social realities, and those realities remain much more current in Utah precisely because of the Church.
Labeling a child’s mind as diseased-whether with autism, intellectual disabilities, or transgenderism-may reflect the discomfort that mind gives parents more than any discomfort it causes their child. Much gets corrected that might better have been left alone.
Psychologically, I will not have to seek far if I decide to kill myself, because in my mind and heart I am more ready for this than for the unplanned daily tribulations that mark off the mornings and afternoons.
If the Mormon Church still supported polygamy, and if it appeared to be a system that was not exploitative of women, I wouldn’t feel that it’s my place to forbid it.
Some people are trapped by the belief that love comes in finite quantities, and that our kind of love exhausts the supply upon which they need to draw. I do not accept competitive models of love, only additive ones.
Depressed people cannot lead a revolution because depressed people can barely manage to get out of bed and put on their shoes and socks.
All parenting turns on a crucial question: to what extent parents should accept their children for who they are, and to what extent they should help them become their best selves.