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I had always thought of myself as fairly tough and fairly strong and fairly able to cope with anything. And then I had a series of personal losses. My mother died. A relationship that I was in came to end, and a variety of other things went awry.

One of the things that frequently gets lost in descriptions of depression is that the depressed person often knows that it is a ludicrous condition to feel so disabled by the ordinary business of quotidian life.

Kids with Down syndrome are, by and large, quite affectionate and relatively guileless, and frequently, the attachments to them grow and deepen. And the meaning that parents find in it grows and deepens.

I'm attached to my children with whatever flaws they have, and if some glorious angel broke through the living room ceiling and offered to exchange them for other, better children, I'd cling to my kids and pray away this specter.

People who are different are constantly dealing with families who don't understand them.

I like the relative literacy of at least some of England. I mean, I didn't come for the food or the weather!

A breakdown involves getting to the point at which your mental state prevents you from doing the normal things of your everyday life. I remember from my own experience that I was completely ambushed by mine.

The anxiety phase of my first depression lasted six months. It was incredibly paralyzing.

Sleep is my great indulgence, and I get eight hours every night. Being chronically overtired raises stress levels in a bad way and is responsible for a lot of depressive breaks.

Oh yes, I certainly have low days. I feel that in treating the depression, it's not so much that I've become happier as it is that I can be unhappy in better ways.

I am not a great believer in the idea that journalistic neutrality means you have to abandon the people you talk to.

Parenting involves two separate activities. You have to change your child in that you need to educate your child and instill moral values in them. But you also need to celebrate your child for who he or she is and make them feel really good.

I think that people are most comfortable when the world is orderly. I think there's the sense that when you begin questioning basic distinctions, such as the distinction between being male and being female, it represents a threat to the social order.

We can never afford to be complacent; there is no such thing as security when it comes to human rights.

Latino kids are not rejected by their parents for being Latino, nor are most Muslims disowned by their parents for being Muslims, but those who are gay are often the target of their families' disapprobation or outright hostility.

Britain's withdrawal from the E.U., like Donald Trump's proposal to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, is based on a false belief in self-reliance.

While all old people have been young, no young people have been old, and this troubling fact engenders the frustration of all parents and elders, which is that while you can describe your experience, you cannot confer it.

Every stage of life longs for others. When one is young and eager, one aspires to maturity, and everyone older would like nothing better than to be young.

The worst mistake anyone can make is to perceive anyone else as lesser. The deeper you look into other souls - and writing is primarily an exercise in doing just that - the clearer people's inherent dignity becomes.

Never forget that the truest luxury is imagination, and that being a writer gives you the leeway to exploit all of the imagination's curious intricacies, to be what you were, what you are, what you will be, and what everyone else is or was or will be, too.

No perfectionist has ever met his own benchmarks, and no one so famished for admiration has ever received enough of it.

Most people imagine that resolving particular problems will make them happy. If only one had more money, or love, or success, then life would feel manageable. It can be devastating to realize the falseness of such tempered optimism.

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.

I'm endlessly intrigued by stories, and I love helping someone to formulate his or her story. I can drift off when I'm reading pure abstraction, but the narratives of human lives hold my attention every time.

It's important to say that depression has biological underpinnings, and that while medications do not seem to create irreversible changes in the brain, repeated depressive episodes do.

Dealing with depression effectively is a mark not of weakness, but of strength.

When you close down your borders, you're helping people build up a lot of hate toward you. That ungenerosity is not only not very attractive, from a moral and social standpoint, but also it's not very effective as a means of defending the country.

I was kind of a scaredy-cat as a kid, and I made a very deliberate decision at some point that I was not going to let fear rule my life or determine my experience. That wasn't so easily accomplished.

My risk tolerance is higher than some people's, but it's not nearly as high as some people's. I don't want to exaggerate my bravado. I haven't been on the front lines. I haven't ever stepped on a land mine.

There is enormous shame around depression of any kind and at any time. And there's enormous social stigma attached to it, which we need to go on fighting. But I think that the sense of depression during pregnancy and early motherhood has been particularly stigmatized, that people especially feel that should be the happiest time of your life.

One the one hand, the simple fact that there are children and that I do have an effect on them has been one of the most potent antidepressants that I've ever had. And on the other hand, there are moments when I feel imprisoned by the reality that I can no longer make my decisions just for myself, that I have to consider the interests of others.

When I was born, the wisdom was that homosexuality was an illness; that it was caused largely by somebody's mother, and a distorted relationship with the mother. And now, as I live my life - married to a husband, with kids - it's an identity.

When I was growing up, I kept hoping that I wasn't really gay because I wanted to have children. I went through a long, tortured period, so the fact that I have been able to be true to myself and have a family has been the nicest surprise of my adulthood.

Forging meaning is about changing yourself. Building identity is about changing the world.

I would have had an easier life if I were straight, but I would not be me. And I now like being myself better than the idea of being someone else, someone who, to be honest, I have neither the option of being nor the ability fully to imagine.

Someday, being gay will be a simple fact, free of party hats and blame. But not yet.

Gay rights are not primarily marriage rights, and for the millions who live in unaccepting places with no resources, dignity remains elusive. I am lucky to have forged meaning and built identity, but that's still a rare privilege. And gay people deserve more, collectively, than the crumbs of justice.

I often say that the opposite of depression is not happiness but vitality.

Depression is so exhausting - it takes up so much of your time and energy - and silence about it, it really does make the depression worse.

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.

Shutting out the depression strengthens it. While you hide from it, it grows.

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.

If you look at the language of illness, you can use it to describe race - you could experience race as an illness. You can experience income level, at many different levels, as a form of illness. You can experience age as an illness. I mean, it's all got an illness component.

I think it would be great if in 50 years you could find out lots more about the conditions your child is going to have - and if we lived in a society that is so tolerant that many things that might now lead to abortion would then be seen as part of human variance.

My parents' usual reprimand was to remind me that I was not the Prince of Wales.

The only way I seem to be able to keep going while I'm writing is to munch my way through boxes of chocolates.

My father's an opera nut, and my stepmother used to work at the Metropolitan Opera, so I had a lot of opera immersion. I like the grandness and pretention of it.

Parenting is no sport for perfectionists.

I've had a mental illness for nearly half my life, and I can no longer imagine myself without it. It seems less like something that happened to me than like part of who I am; some days, it is the thing about me, but it is always at least a thing about me.

Writing 'The Noonday Demon' turned me into a professional depressive, which is a weird thing to be. A class at the university I attended assigns the book and invited me to be a guest lecturer.

When I'm not depressed, I draw strength and beauty from depression; when I am depressed, I find no such things.

I loathe having a fragile brain and knowing as I make any plan that I should provide for the possibility that my mind may betray me at short notice.

As a little kid in the late 1960s, I was afraid of the world. Even if I didn't get caught in the draft that was sending American teenagers to Vietnam, there was always the possibility of a Soviet nuclear attack. I made constant escape plans and imagined a life going from port to port.

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.

I started traveling out of curiosity, but I have come to believe in travel's political importance, that encouraging a nation's citizenry to travel may be as important as encouraging school attendance, environmental conservation, or national thrift. You cannot understand the otherness of places you have not encountered.

We think that fear must be played out in fight, with military intervention, or in flight, via isolationism - but we are not hunted game, and those are not the only options. There is also the possibility of acceptance, with its corollary of understanding and its ultimate manifestation in embracing.

Just as Chairman Mao and Joseph Stalin started by going after the intellectuals, against those whose words who might form an opposition to them, so Trump has gone across us. Free speech is first among equals when we look at what is being violated by this new regime.

With the removal of questions about gayness and transgender status in the Census, we really stand to lose a lot of the progress that has been made, and certainly not to make further progress. In order to have a fair system, you need a system you can measure.

Nowadays, people often ask me when I came out, generalising from the experience of many young people who announce themselves to the world on a particular afternoon. But I did not divorce my reticence in a single sharp break. Rather, I seeped out like a spreading wine stain.

The problem is that even as you reveal the mysteries in your past, you are accumulating them in the present; complete honesty is the stuff of post-mortem, not autobiography.

No one much wants to be belittled, but we tolerate slurs surprisingly often for ourselves; for our lionised children, we demand freedom from insult.

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.

We need to acknowledge that families come in multiple shapes and sizes, that love is not a finite asset, and that caregiving involves more than a genetic imperative.

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