The tragedies that are being brought about vastly outweigh the benefits that are being achieved.
I do think that if the Church can see its way to greater tolerance, Church members will have greater exposure to gay people, and the lives of those gay people will be better.
In these xenophobic times, when politicians are stoking everyone’s anxiety about threats from abroad, I would argue that engaging with the rest of the world is not only a luxury, in the way that travel is, but actually a moral responsibility.
I really feel that the Church leaders have blood on their hands. I feel that there are gay Mormons who have committed suicide or whose lives have been destroyed because of the attitude of the Church.
Being gay is immutable.
I don’t believe that raising my voice in song is going to be pleasing to a God who is sitting upstairs somewhere, waiting to be pleased.
The campaign against polygamy, around which a lot of anti-Mormon sentiment was organized, seems horrific to me.
It seems particularly ironic that a church that at one stage, a long time ago, fought to redefine marriage should now be so opposed to these attempts to redefine marriage.
I had known a couple of people who had died, but the loss of my mother contained something of the profoundly unknowable.
Listen to the people who love you. Believe that they are worth living for even when you don’t believe it. Seek out the memories depression takes away and project them into the future. Be brave; be strong; take your pills. Exercise because it’s good for you even if every step weighs a thousand pounds. Eat when food itself disgusts you. Reason with yourself when you have lost your reason.
In the throws of depression, one reaches a strange point at which it is impossible to see the line between ones own theatricality and the reality of madness. I discovered two conflicting qualities of character. I am melodramatic by nature; on the other hand, I can go out and “seem normal” under the most abnormal of circumstances. Antonin Artaud wrote on one of his drawings, “never real and always true”, and that is how depression feels. You know that it is not real, that you are someone else, and yet you know that it is absolutely true. Its very confusing.
My goal is to stay safely in between self-analysis and self-destruction.
You lose the ability to trust anyone, to be touched, to grieve. Eventually, you are simply absent from yourself.
The things that save you are as frequently trivial as monumental.
The worst of depression lies in a present moment that cannot escape the past it idealizes or deplores.
There is no contradiction between loving someone and feeling burdened by that person; indeed, love tends to magnify the burden.
Grief is a humble angel who leaves you with strong, clear thoughts and a sense of your own depth. Depression is a demon who leaves you appalled.
There is no essential self that lies pure as a vein of gold under the chaos of experience and chemistry. Anything can be changed, and we must understand the human organism as a sequence of selves that succumb to or choose one another.
I had thought that when you feel your worst your tears flood, but the very worst pain is the arid pain of total violation that comes after the tears are all used up, the pain that stops up every space through which you once metered the world, or the world, you. This is the presence of major depression.
She looked at me – I was crying, though she was not – and she took on a tone of gentle reprimand. ‘Don’t think you’re paying me some kind of tribute if you let my death become the great event of your life,’ she said to me. ‘The best tribute you can pay to me as a mother is to go on and have a good and fulfilling life. Enjoy what you have.