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.

Sometimes, people end up thankful for what they mourned. You cannot achieve this state by seeking tragedy, but you can keep yourself open more to sorrow's richness than to unmediated despair. Tragedies with happy endings may be sentimental tripe, or they may be the true meaning of love.

One has to weigh all of one's values always in relative terms. On the upside, you get people who are not acting on their homosexual attraction, who are avoiding the sin of practicing homosexuality. On the downside, you have destroyed marriages, traumatized children, and dead people who have taken their own lives.

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

It is nearly impossible to hate anyone whose story you know.

I look at the rates of suicide among gay teens. They are so, so high for suicide attempts and for completed suicides.

I did grow up in a household in which I felt that to be myself was to damage the people I loved.