Top 100 Andrew Solomon Quotes
#1. That is, perhaps, the greatest revelation I have had: not that depression is compelling but that the people who suffer from it may become compelling because of it.
Andrew Solomon
#2. One loves and is loved in great pain, and one is alive in the experience of it. It is the walking-death quality of depression that I have tried to eliminate from my life;
Andrew Solomon
#3. I was in fact anxious about whether I would be any good at being a father. And then I met so many people who had been good parents under difficult circumstances, and I felt inspired by them.
Andrew Solomon
#4. We cannot bear a pointless torment, but we can endure great pain if we believe that it's purposeful.
Andrew Solomon
#5. I'm not studying everything that can go wrong. What I'm studying is how much love there can be, even when everything appears to be going wrong.
Andrew Solomon
#6. In these xenophobic times, when politicians are stoking everyone's anxiety about threats from abroad, I would argue that engaging with the rest of the world is not only a luxury, in the way that travel is, but actually a moral responsibility.
Andrew Solomon
#7. I had known a couple of people who had died, but the loss of my mother contained something of the profoundly unknowable.
Andrew Solomon
#8. Parenthood always involves recognizing your child as separate and different from you.
Andrew Solomon
#10. Some autistic people may emerge from their condition, but nobody knows when and why.
Andrew Solomon
#11. I hate the comparative idea that you have to love your spouse more than you love your parents.
Andrew Solomon
#12. The things that save you are as frequently trivial as monumental.
Andrew Solomon
#13. A lot of people are very political when they are young, and then they outgrow it.
Andrew Solomon
#14. You can't fit in with people by pretending to be just like they are; you fit in by engaging in a dialogue about your differences, and by putting aside the assumption that your way of life is in any way preferable to theirs.
Andrew Solomon
#15. I think an awful lot of the diplomatic problems that exist in the world come from people assuming that their society is the one with a purchase on truth.
Andrew Solomon
#16. Perhaps depression can best be described as emotional pain that forces itself on us against our will, and then breaks free of its externals.
Andrew Solomon
#17. We don't seek the painful experiences that hew our identities, but we seek our identities in the wake of painful experiences.
Andrew Solomon
#18. It is the aloneness within us made manifest, and it destroys not only connection to others but also the ability to be peacefully alone with oneself.
Andrew Solomon
#19. You need to take the traumas and make them part of who you've come to be, and you need to fold the worst events of your life into a narrative of triumph, evincing a better self in response to things that hurt.
Andrew Solomon
#20. I believe that organized religion is an ornament to the truth, and that aesthetics are part of its power.
Andrew Solomon
#21. There is no such thing as reproduction, only acts of production.
Andrew Solomon
#22. I look at the rates of suicide among gay teens. They are so, so high for suicide attempts and for completed suicides.
Andrew Solomon
#23. The more gay people can tell our stories, the more other people will accept gay people.
Andrew Solomon
#24. 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.
Andrew Solomon
#25. 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.
Andrew Solomon
#26. I love to communicate, and I love music. That's why I always thought not being able to hear would be a tragedy.
Andrew Solomon
#27. 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.
Andrew Solomon
#28. Religion is so focused on family. These days, for many people, being gay is also focused on family.
Andrew Solomon
#29. A witness can be of more value than a policy analyst. An amateur witness, free of conceptual bias, sometimes sees the plainest truth. One should never be blinded by tailoring.
Andrew Solomon
#30. I like the relative literacy of at least some of England. I mean, I didn't come for the food or the weather!
Andrew Solomon
#31. The thing that makes me really outraged, is the idea that the Mormon Church would presume to get involved in decisions that have little to do with Mormonism.
Andrew Solomon
#32. When I was younger, not being accepted made me enraged, but now, I am not inclined to dismantle my history. If you banish the dragons, you banish the heroes-and we become attached to the heroic strain in our personal history.
Andrew Solomon
#33. 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.
Andrew Solomon
#34. In typical circumstances, to have children who won't care for you in your dotage is to be King Lear. Disability changes the reciprocity equation.
Andrew Solomon
#35. Despite every advancement, language remains the defining nexus of our humanity; it is where our knowledge and hope lie. It is the precondition of human tenderness, mightier than the sword but also infinitely more subtle and ultimately more urgent.
Andrew Solomon
#36. I have spent a lot of my life trying to do good and be a humanitarian, to write about difficult places, and to tell the story of oppressed peoples.
Andrew Solomon
#37. I think you can't deny that because the cochlear implant exists, the signing world is shrinking.
Andrew Solomon
#38. People around depressives expect them to get themselves together: our society has little room in it for moping. Spouses, parents, children, and friends are all subject to being brought down themselves, and they do not want to be close to measureless pain.
Andrew Solomon
#39. It's a strange poverty of the English language, and indeed, of many other languages, that we use this same word, "depression" to describe how a kid feels when it rains on his birthday, and to describe how somebody feels the minute before they commit suicide.
Andrew Solomon
#40. A large proportion of my best friends are a little bit crazy ... I try to be cautious with my friends who are too sane. Depression is itself destructive, and it breeds destructive impulses: I am easily disappointed in people who don't get it ...
Andrew Solomon
#41. I don't believe that there is anyone of faith whose faith would not be strengthened by those experiences of family.
Andrew Solomon
#42. I'll tell them all the good things and some difficulties. The parents may never accept what happened to them and yet accept their child. They're two separate things, the parental loss, and the actual person they will almost always end up loving.
Andrew Solomon
#43. A crushed hope is suffused with a nobility that mere hopelessness can never know.
Andrew Solomon
#44. 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.
Andrew Solomon
#45. Our needs are our greatest asset. It turns out I've learned to give all the things that I need.
Andrew Solomon
#46. Science still won't explain the mysterious nature of love and despair.
Andrew Solomon
#47. You lose the ability to trust anyone, to be touched, to grieve. Eventually, you are simply absent from yourself.
Andrew Solomon
#48. I think what the Church should ideally do, and does appear to do in the context of straight relationships, is to support people in crossing from the easier pleasure of momentary carnal satisfaction, into the more difficult pleasure of love and family and relationship.
Andrew Solomon
#49. Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance.
Andrew Solomon
#50. If you wake up feeling no pain, you know you're dead. (Russian expression)
Andrew Solomon
#51. I know one gay ex-Mormon who is a talented, self-destructive alcoholic. Whenever he is drunk and going on a tear, we are back to the Mormon Church and his being thrown out of the Mormon Church and growing up with this sense of being evil.
Andrew Solomon
#52. The absence of marriages will result in all kinds of financial burdens that gay people wouldn't face if they could get married.
Andrew Solomon
#53. I did grow up in a household in which I felt that to be myself was to damage the people I loved.
Andrew Solomon
#54. Depression frequently destroys the power of mind over mood.
Andrew Solomon
#55. 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.
Andrew Solomon
#56. Biology is not destiny. There are ways to lead a good life with depression. Indeed, people who learn from their depression can develop a particular moral profundity from the experience,
Andrew Solomon
#57. I realized that I had demanded that my parents accept me but had resisted accepting them.
Andrew Solomon
#58. 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.
Andrew Solomon
#59. Psychologically, I will not have to seek far if I decide to kill myself, because in my mind and heart I am more ready for this than for the unplanned daily tribulations that mark off the mornings and afternoons.
Andrew Solomon
#60. I have found that the greatest stories of acceptance and love and the ugliest stories of hideous cruelty and abuse have equally been perpetrated in the name of Christian faith.
Andrew Solomon
#61. When the child does not conform to this image, the parents often need help in adapting their behavior to the reality - they
Andrew Solomon
#62. As organs go, the brain is quite an important one, and its malfunctions should be addressed accordingly. Chemistry
Andrew Solomon
#63. Parents often confuse the anomaly of developing fast with the objective of developing profoundly.
Andrew Solomon
#64. If something or someone doesn't work, it's in a state of grace, progress, and evolution. It will attract love and empathy. If it does work, it has merely completed its job and is probably dead.
Andrew Solomon
#65. Belonging is one of the things that makes life bearable, and it can be tough to look at a binary world and choose against both sides.
Andrew Solomon
#66. People ... don't want to be cured or changed or eliminated. They want to be whoever it is that they've come to be.
Andrew Solomon
#67. I tend to find the ecstasy hidden in ordinary joys because I did not expect those joys to be ordinary to me.
Andrew Solomon
#68. I feel, as a matter nearly of faith, that if you have known a certain amount of suffering and have emerged out of it into the light, you are obliged to share that light with as many of the still-beleaguered as possible.
Andrew Solomon
#69. The idea of what it is like to lose everything is awful.
Andrew Solomon
#70. 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.
Andrew Solomon
#71. My goal is to stay safely in between self-analysis and self-destruction.
Andrew Solomon
#72. The parental predisposition to love prevails in the most harrowing of circumstances.
Andrew Solomon
#73. A Buddhist scholar once explained to me that most Westerners mistakenly think that Nirvana is what you arrive at when your suffering is over and only an eternity of happiness stretches ahead. But such bliss would always be shadowed by the sorrow of the past and would therefore be imperfect.
Andrew Solomon
#74. It seems particularly ironic that a church that at one stage, a long time ago, fought to redefine marriage should now be so opposed to these attempts to redefine marriage.
Andrew Solomon
#75. The LP actress Linda Hunt once wrote, 'Dwarfism, after all, isn't like cancer or heart disease. It isn't fatal, and it isn't even an illness. It is physical, though, and inescapable. You don't get over it. It is you. But you aren't it, and that's an important distinction.
Andrew Solomon
#76. Living with depression is like trying to keep your balance while you dance with a goat
it is perfectly sane to prefer a partner with a better sense of balance.
Andrew Solomon
#78. Em unless you got the money to pay. Fred has been given a regimen of meds for HIV, but he stopped
Andrew Solomon
#79. I believe that words are strong, that they can overwhelm what we fear when fear seems more awful than life is good.
Andrew Solomon
#80. 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.
Andrew Solomon
#81. 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.
Andrew Solomon
#82. That, in essence, is the catastrophe of suicide for those who survive: not only the loss of someone, but the loss of the chance to persuade that person to act differently, the loss of the chance to connect.
Andrew Solomon
#83. I don't accept subtractive models of love, only additive ones. And I believe that in the same way we need species diversity to ensure that the planet can go on, so we need this diversity of affection and diversity of family in order to strengthen the ecosphere of kindness
Andrew Solomon
#84. Depression is the flaw in love. If you were married to someone and thought, "Well, if my wife dies, I'll find another one," it wouldn't be love as we know it. There's no such thing as love without the anticipation of loss, and that specter of despair can be the engine of intimacy.
Andrew Solomon
#85. Some parents manufacture an affirmative construction of their child's disability to disguise their despair, while others have a deep and genuine experience of joy in caring for disabled children, and that sometimes the first stance can generate the second.
Andrew Solomon
#86. We live in the right time, even if it doesn't always feel like it.
Andrew Solomon
#87. It is easy to keep secrets by being honest in an ironic tone of voice.
Andrew Solomon
#88. I found it very comforting to see that there is no such thing as a completely normal family. People find their way through whatever the differences may be.
Andrew Solomon
#89. Hatred does not obliterate love. Indeed, the two are in constant fellowship.
Andrew Solomon
#90. At the end of the day, will God be interested primarily in whether I have been kind and helped others, or in whether I was baptized and how?
Andrew Solomon
#91. Ease makes less of an impression on us than struggle.
Andrew Solomon
#92. Many coping strategies have a Zen simplicity. Instead of resolving chaos, find beauty and happiness amid chaos. I am reminded of a friend who said that when she found out her husband couldn't fill her needs, she changed her needs;
Andrew Solomon
#93. I don't understand what the nature of God is. But I do have the feeling that I'm at some feet, and lucky to be there.
Andrew Solomon
#94. 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
Andrew Solomon
#95. Any community that remains an abstraction is an easy target for prejudice and cruelty, but any community that becomes fully humanized is much harder to treat in that way.
Andrew Solomon
#96. Without self-discovery," Hahn wrote, extending an idea of Nietzsche's, "a person may still have self-confidence, but it is a self-confidence built on ignorance and it melts in the face of heavy burdens.
Andrew Solomon
#97. I hated being depressed, but it was also in depression that I learned my own acreage, the full extent of my soul.
Andrew Solomon
#98. 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.
Andrew Solomon
#99. Rebuilding of the self in and after depression requires love, insight, work, and, most of all, time.
Andrew Solomon
#100. But you are never the same once you have acquired the knowledge that there is no self that will not crumble. We are told to learn self-reliance, but it's tricky if you have no self on which to rely.
Andrew Solomon
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