“Sometimes she wished for someone she could tell about her problems, just to be able to say, ‘I’m in love with a man and I can’t have him.’ But that would only lead to questions she couldn’t answer, so she kept the secret and the pain inside, hoping someday she would no longer feel as if half of her were missing.”

I like my coffee with cream and my literature with optimism.

Do you know what it is to be a man violently in love? To live for a woman’s smiles and laughter, to hunger for her touch until life itself seems impossible without it, to desire her as you desire to breathe?

Love is the effort and desire to make someone else everything they were created to be.

You can feel when something’s authentic, and you can feel when it’s not: you know when someone’s trying to make the club record, or trying to make the girl record, or trying to make the thug record. It’s none of that. It’s just my emotions.

In my experience, the hardest thing about having someone “come out” to you is the “pretending to be surprised” part.

They say that when you’re about to die, your life flashes before your eyes. They never tell you that when you watch someone you once loved dying, hovering between this life and the next, it’s twice as painful, because you’re reliving two lives that traveled one road together.

Jobless people will have no self-confidence. And they feel they are worthless because when you don’t have a job you have to rely on someone.

If you are feeling helpless, help someone.

To me, when someone wrongs you, you both share the burden of that wrongdoing—the pain of it weighs on both of you. Forgiveness, then, means choosing to bear the full weight all by yourself.

So if hearing that the CEO of Apple is gay can help someone struggling to come to terms with who he or she is, or bring comfort to anyone who feels alone, or inspire people to insist on their equality, then it’s worth the trade-off with my own privacy.