I did grow up in a household in which I felt that to be myself was to damage the people I loved.

Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance.

It is nearly impossible to hate anyone whose story you know.

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

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

A sense of humor is the best indicator that you will recover; it is often the best indicator that people will love you. Sustain that and you have hope.

I can see the beauty of glass objects fully at the moment when they slip from my hand

I believe that words are strong, that they can overwhelm what we fear when fear seems more awful than life is good.

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

Life is enriched by difficulty; love is made more acute when it requires exertion.

When you believe that you cannot stitch your own heart back together, go to work on the hearts of other people; there is no surer way to repair yourself than to repair them.

We can all get more together than we can apart. And this is the way we gain power. Power is the ability to achieve purpose, power is the ability to effect change, and we need power.

The great way to live life is to love.

Getting down to the gym a couple days a week and having low-fat milk in your morning latte isn’t going to make much of a dent in a system or lifestyle that is essentially, well, unwell.

No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers.

But I finally concluded that it is an inalienable right of lovers everywhere to become temporarily worthless to the world, it may even be their duty.

I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things.

For things to reveal themselves to us, we need to be ready to abandon our views about them.

Desire is hunger is the fire I breathe, love is a banquet on which we feed.

I want to encourage public interest in space. I have never let my condition stop me. You only live once.

And if any work that I have done should have value beyond my own lifetime, I believe it will be the happy labors of the decade 1869-1878.