Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair.
I believe that words are strong, that they can overwhelm what we fear when fear seems more awful than life is good.
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.
Love is circumstantial we can love anyone if need be and losing the one we love is the singular catastrophe. Time does not heal it. Every present moment yearns for even the roughest past.
There is no such thing as reproduction, only acts of production.
If real experience has triggered your descent into depression, you have a human yen to understand it even when you have ceased to experience it; the limited of experience that is achieved with chemical pills is not tantamount to a cure.
I chose fat and functional over slender and miserable.
There is so much pain in the world, and most of these people keep theirs secret, rolling through agonizing lives in invisible wheelchairs, dressed in invisible bodycasts.
If you banish the dragons, you banish the heroes…
Travel is a set of corrective lenses that helps focus the planet’s blurred reality.
Those who believe their suffering has been valuable love more readily than those who see no meaning in their pain. Suffering does not necessarily imply love, but love implies suffering
The Internet,” [Judy] Singer said, “is a prosthetic device for people who can’t socialize without it.” For anyone challenged by language and social rules, a communication system that does not operate in real time is a godsend.
Life is most transfixing when you are awake to diversity, not only of ethnicity, ability, gender, belief, and sexuality but also of age and experience. The worst mistake anyone can make is to perceive anyone else as lesser.
As you ripen, you’ll notice that time is the weirdest thing in the world, that these surprises are relentless, and that getting older is not a stroll but an ambush.
It is not true that “love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.” Love alters all the time; it is fluid, in perceptual flux, an evolving business across a lifetime.
Some people are trapped by the belief that love comes in finite quantities, and that our kind of love exhausts the supply upon which they need to draw. I do not accept competitive models of love, only additive ones.
Dealing with depression effectively is a mark not of weakness, but of strength.
You don’t think in depression that you’ve put on a gray veil and are seeing the world through the haze of a bad mood. You think that the veil has been taken away, the veil of happiness, and that now you’re seeing truly.
A great hope gets crushed every time someone reminds us that happiness can be neither assumed nor earned; that we are all prisoners of our own flawed brains; that the ultimate aloneness in each of us is, finally, inviolable.
Now, it’s not that I think that being gay is the most amazing, wonderful thing in the world, but I have a husband; I have a life; I have friends who I’ve met through this. It’s who I am.
Fortunately for me, my mother loved travel. Our first non-beach family trip abroad – to England, France, and Switzerland – came when I was 11, and thereafter, we often tagged along on my father’s European business trips.
Travel is an exercise partly in broadening yourself and partly in defining your own limits.
People still ask my husband and me which of us is the mom – which, as one lesbian friend pointed out to me, is like asking which chopstick is the fork. This pressure on us to embody normative traditions can be paralysing.