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

It's deeply humbling to realize that there is no such thing as a society with a purchase on truth.

It is important not to suppress your feelings altogether when you are depressed. It is equally important to avoid terrible arguments or expressions of outrage. You should steer clear of emotionally damaging behavior. People forgive, but it is best not to stir things up to the point at which forgiveness is required. When you are depressed, you need the love of other people, and yet depression fosters actions that destroy that love. Depressed people often stick pins into their own life rafts. The conscious mind can intervene. One is not helpless.

Identity itself should be not a smug label or a gold medal but a revolution.

One of the things that often gets lost in discussions of depression is that you know it's ridiculous. You know it's ridiculous while you're experiencing it. You know that most people manage to listen to their messages, and eat lunch, and organise themselves to take a shower and go out the front door, and that it's not a big deal. And yet you are nonetheless in its grip and you are unable to figure out any way around it.

I'm not studying everything that can go wrong. What I'm studying is how much love there can be, even when everything appears to be going wrong.

We don't seek the painful experiences that hew our identities, but we seek our identities in the wake of painful experiences.