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

If some glorious angel suddenly descended through my living room ceiling and offered to take away the children I have and give me other, better children — more polite, funnier, nicer, smarter — I would cling to the children I have and pray away that atrocious spectacle.

I had always wanted to have children, so it caused me a lot of grief when I was younger, and I had supposed that gay people could not be parents.

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

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.

Science still won't explain the mysterious nature of love and despair.

I have two nexuses of sadness about the Mormon Church. The first is the effect the Church's position on homosexuality has on Mormons.