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.
We don’t seek the painful experiences that hew our identities, but we seek our identities in the wake of painful experiences.
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.
I felt like all of the work was training for just one central idea: Accept your child for who he is. I’m not saying that I’ve done a brilliant job with that. But I’ve done my best.
If some glorious angel suddenly descended through my living room ceiling and offered to take away the children I have and give me other, better children – more polite, funnier, nicer, smarter – I would cling to the children I have and pray away that atrocious spectacle.
I hated being depressed, but it was also in depression that I learned my own acreage, the full extent of my soul.
The experience of being depressed and emerging from depression made me understand the idea of a soul. I felt that the language in which one could best acknowledge that drew from faith.
Fixing is the illness model; acceptance is the identity model; which way any family goes reflects their assumptions and resources.
I believe very deeply that this beauty I call the soul is not a random occurrence. I don’t know what its meaning is at some larger level, but I know that it has meaning.
Exercise because it’s good for you even if every step weighs a thousand pounds.
I have always believed in trying to be a good person and giving to the world, and treating others in a just, kind, merciful way.