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

The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, and it was vitality that seemed to seep out of me.

Absence does not so much make the heart grow fonder as give the heart time to integrate what it has not previously absorbed, time to make sense of what happened too quickly to have any meaning in the instant. This is always true. If it is in absence that people forget each other, it is also in the quiet pause of absence that, minds running in symmetry, people come to know each other; there is sometimes as much intimacy in the span of continents as in the shared hours before dawn.

With children who have never said a word, parents tend to assume, for better or for worse, that there isn't any language there.

Philip Galanes has fashioned a novel both bleak and funny about a young man's struggle to sort out his troubled love: the too-strong love for his mother, the too-weak love for his suicidal father, and the all-consuming love of anonymous sexual encounters. Pointed and acute, this story tells of the narrator's many betrayals of others and their many betrayals of him. It exists in an uncomfortable moral space where the humor of terrible things sometimes outweighs, but never obscures, their poignancy.

People … don't want to be cured or changed or eliminated. They want to be whoever it is that they've come to be.

The tragedies that are being brought about vastly outweigh the benefits that are being achieved.