In these xenophobic times, when politicians are stoking everyone's anxiety about threats from abroad, I would argue that engaging with the rest of the world is not only a luxury, in the way that travel is, but actually a moral responsibility.

If your love didn't always contain the possibility of loss, it would be very different from human love as we know it.

Treating an identity as an illness invites real illness to make a braver stand.

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

If some glorious angel suddenly descended through my living room ceiling and offered to take away the children I have and give me other, better children — more polite, funnier, nicer, smarter — I would cling to the children I have and pray away that atrocious spectacle.

Science still won't explain the mysterious nature of love and despair.

Depression means that you have no point of view.