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

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

Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance. It is tumbleweed distress that thrives on thin air, growing despite its detachment from the nourishing earth. It can be described only in metaphor and allegory

Life is enriched by difficulty; love is made more acute when it requires exertion.

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.

My parents deeply and truly loved each other, and if my mother hadn't died they would have been together forever. They were together for as much of forever as was given to them. They really loved my brother and me and were very good to us. It gave the model of how to have a happy marriage and family, but it also set the bar very high.

Being gay is immutable. Maybe someday we'll figure out more of the science and it will be changeable, but we have no leads so far.