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.

I grew up feeling that to be gay was a tragedy. I didn't grow up thinking that it was morally wrong, but I grew up thinking that it would make me marginal, prevent me from having children, and quite possibly prevent me from having a meaningful long relationship. It seemed that this condition would leave me with a vastly reduced life.

I'd had a vaguely Jewish upbringing, but no deep connection to faith.

The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, and it was vitality that seemed to seep out of me.

I tend to find the ecstasy hidden in ordinary joys, because I did not expect those joys to be ordinary to me.

Despair is part of love.

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.