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

I understand why there would be prohibitions on straying from monogamy because of the harm that it does not only to the person who is betrayed, but also to the person who is betraying. "Betray" is a sort of shorthand for what happens.

I got into my first serious relationship with a man when I was twenty-three. I had, before that, sort of a typical, sad history of relatively promiscuous sexual encounters with men I didn't know, because I felt that if I were involved with people I did know, other people would know that I was gay, and it was something that I needed to keep so secret.

You need to take the traumas and make them part of who you've come to be, and you need to fold the worst events of your life into a narrative of triumph, evincing a better self in response to things that hurt.

Listen to the people who love you. Believe that they are worth living for even when you don't believe it.

I believe very deeply that this beauty I call the soul is not a random occurrence. I don't know what its meaning is at some larger level, but I know that it has meaning.

The experience of being depressed and emerging from depression made me understand the idea of a soul. I felt that the language in which one could best acknowledge that drew from faith.