Depression is the flaw in love. There's no such thing as love without the anticipation of loss. And that specter of despair can be the engine of intimacy.

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.

We don't seek the painful experiences that hew our identities, but we seek our identities in the wake of painful experiences.

I understand perfectly well why the Catholic Church preaches against abortion. But it shouldn't be the purpose of the Catholic Church to prevent non-Catholics from having abortions if they feel that abortions are morally acceptable. They can certainly only argue for what they believe to be right in the court of public opinion and try to persuade people.

Depressed people cannot lead a revolution because depressed people can barely manage to get out of bed and put on their shoes and socks.

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.

Absence does not so much make the heart grow fonder as give the heart time to integrate what it has not previously absorbed, time to make sense of what happened too quickly to have any meaning in the instant. This is always true. If it is in absence that people forget each other, it is also in the quiet pause of absence that, minds running in symmetry, people come to know each other; there is sometimes as much intimacy in the span of continents as in the shared hours before dawn.