We cannot bear a pointless torment, but we can endure great pain if we believe that it's purposeful.

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

Our needs are our greatest asset. It turns out I've learned to give all the things that I need.

Antonin Artaud wrote on one of his drawings, "Never real and always true," and that is how depression feels. You know that it is not real, that you are someone else, and yet you know that it is absolutely true.

Kids with Down syndrome are, by and large, quite affectionate and relatively guileless, and frequently, the attachments to them grow and deepen. And the meaning that parents find in it grows and deepens.

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.

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