I was in fact anxious about whether I would be any good at being a father. And then I met so many people who had been good parents under difficult circumstances, and I felt inspired by them.

Oppression breeds the power to oppose it.

In coming to an appreciation of the Mormon Church, one of the things that has been most compelling to me is the Mormon understanding of family, which extends beyond the general injunction to be fruitful and multiply, and addresses the permanence of love relationships into eternity, and embraces the sanctity of having children.

I can see the beauty of glass objects fully at the moment when they slip from my hand

I hated being depressed, but it was also in depression that I learned my own acreage, the full extent of my soul.

I had known a couple of people who had died, but the loss of my mother contained something of the profoundly unknowable.

Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance.