I look at the rates of suicide among gay teens. They are so, so high for suicide attempts and for completed suicides.

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

I hate the comparative idea that you have to love your spouse more than you love your parents.

Mild depression is a gradual and sometimes permanent thing that undermines people the way rust weakens iron ... Like physical pain that becomes chronic, it is miserable not so much because it is intolerable in the moment as because it is intolerable to have known it in the moments gone and to look forward only to knowing it in the moments to come.

I felt a funeral in my brain, and mourners to and fro kept treading, treading till I felt that sense was breaking through. And when they all were seated, a service, like a drum, kept beating, beating, till I felt my mind was going numb. And then I heard them lift a box and creak across my soul with those same boots of lead again, then space began to toll, as if the heavens were a bell and being were an ear, and I, and silence, some strange race wrecked, solitary, here. Just then, a plank in reason broke, and I fell down and down and hit a world at every plunge, and finished knowing then.

A lot of people are very political when they are young, and then they outgrow it.

It is nearly impossible to hate anyone whose story you know.