Top 100 Andrew Solomon Quotes
#1. 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
#3. The campaign against polygamy, around which a lot of anti-Mormon sentiment was organized, seems horrific to me.
Andrew Solomon
#4. I have always believed in trying to be a good person and giving to the world, and treating others in a just, kind, merciful way.
Andrew Solomon
#5. There is no life that does not have the material for despair in it, but some people go too close to the edge and others manage to stay sometimes sad in a safe clearing far from the cliffs. Once you cross over, the rules all change.
Andrew Solomon
#6. Your gender identity is who you are. Sexual identity is who you bounce that off of.
Andrew Solomon
#7. I'm sure that if we had enough sophistication, someone could look at what my changes in brain structure were as I came to feel more deeply in love.
Andrew Solomon
#8. Mothering requires two impulses- the impulse to hold on, and the impulse to push away.
Andrew Solomon
#9. If the Mormon Church still supported polygamy, and if it appeared to be a system that was not exploitative of women, I wouldn't feel that it's my place to forbid it.
Andrew Solomon
#10. The tragedies that are being brought about vastly outweigh the benefits that are being achieved.
Andrew Solomon
#11. Disability scholars Andrienne Asch and Erik Parens, in their seminal discussion of the problem, wrote,'Pre-natal diagnosis reinforces the medical model that disability itself, not societal discrimination against people with disabilities, is the problem to be solved.
Andrew Solomon
#12. If you attach better services to a diagnostic category, some doctors will apply that diagnosis to children from whom it is not entirely appropriate in order to access those services.
Andrew Solomon
#13. I regret everything because it has just finished, and already when I was twelve, I lamented the time that had gone by. Even in the best of spirits, it's always been as though I wrestle with the present in a vain effort to stop its becoming the past.
Andrew Solomon
#14. If the earth could feed itself and us without rain, and if we conquered the weather and declared permanent sun, would we not miss grey days and summer storms?
Andrew Solomon
#15. 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
#16. I hate the loss of diversity in the world, even though I sometimes get a little worn out by being that diversity.
Andrew Solomon
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. [I]f you live abroad any good while, the notion of home is permanently compromised. You will always be missing another place, and no national logic will ever again seem fully obvious to you.
Andrew Solomon
#20. The strengthening of faith, I think, is the ultimate goal of organized religion altogether.
Andrew Solomon
#21. Cleaving to our own lives, with all their challenges and limitations and particularities, is vital.
Andrew Solomon
#22. All parenting turns on a crucial question: to what extent parents should accept their children for who they are, and to what extent they should help them become their best selves.
Andrew Solomon
#23. I'm a huge believer in science. But I don't think it explains everything.
Andrew Solomon
#24. 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
#25. Religion is so focused on family. These days, for many people, being gay is also focused on family.
Andrew Solomon
#26. Identity itself should be not a smug label or a gold medal but a revolution.
Andrew Solomon
#27. 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
#28. You lose the ability to trust anyone, to be touched, to grieve. Eventually, you are simply absent from yourself.
Andrew Solomon
#29. Exercise because it's good for you even if every step weighs a thousand pounds.
Andrew Solomon
#30. Science still won't explain the mysterious nature of love and despair.
Andrew Solomon
#31. Our needs are our greatest asset. It turns out I've learned to give all the things that I need.
Andrew Solomon
#32. I hope the Church will examine what is good and what is ill, and what good could be achieved by getting the suicidal, self-destructive, possibly carnal, or celibate to move toward this experience of love.
Andrew Solomon
#33. 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
#34. A crushed hope is suffused with a nobility that mere hopelessness can never know.
Andrew Solomon
#35. [P]laces that seem lovely at first glance may actually be sinister, but places that feel sinister seldom turn out to be lovely.
Andrew Solomon
#36. 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
#37. I don't believe that there is anyone of faith whose faith would not be strengthened by those experiences of family.
Andrew Solomon
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. I really feel that the Church leaders have blood on their hands. I feel that there are gay Mormons who have committed suicide or whose lives have been destroyed because of the attitude of the Church.
Andrew Solomon
#41. 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
#42. Travel is a set of corrective lenses that helps focus the planet's blurred reality.
Andrew Solomon
#44. 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
#45. I think you can't deny that because the cochlear implant exists, the signing world is shrinking.
Andrew Solomon
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. I encounter a lot of prejudice and a lot of darkness. I have to negotiate constantly through situations that are uncomfortable or difficult or strange.
Andrew Solomon
#50. Woody Allen once quipped that dwarf is once of the four funniest words in the English language. To be in your very essence perceived as comical is a significant burden.
Andrew Solomon
#51. I had known a couple of people who had died, but the loss of my mother contained something of the profoundly unknowable.
Andrew Solomon
#52. Oppression sometimes benefits its victims more than its perpetrators.
Andrew Solomon
#53. 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
#54. Depressed people cannot lead a revolution because depressed people can barely manage to get out of bed and put on their shoes and socks.
Andrew Solomon
#55. 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
#56. With children who have never said a word, parents tend to assume, for better or for worse, that there isn't any language there.
Andrew Solomon
#57. A lot of people are very political when they are young, and then they outgrow it.
Andrew Solomon
#58. The things that save you are as frequently trivial as monumental.
Andrew Solomon
#59. There is no question that abuse, drugs and exposure to violence at home can exacerbate someone's criminal tendencies enormously. But there are many, many criminals who don't come from that background.
Andrew Solomon
#60. I hate the comparative idea that you have to love your spouse more than you love your parents.
Andrew Solomon
#61. Some autistic people may emerge from their condition, but nobody knows when and why.
Andrew Solomon
#63. Parenthood always involves recognizing your child as separate and different from you.
Andrew Solomon
#64. If your love didn't always contain the possibility of loss, it would be very different from human love as we know it.
Andrew Solomon
#65. If really good people who are deeply committed and who are thriving spiritually have to beat down the nature with which they seem to have been born and cut themselves off from the full realization of love, how can that be pleasing to God?
Andrew Solomon
#66. I think it's up to the parents to determine whether what they're doing is consigning their child to difficulty. It's not as though they were crippling their children after they were born.
Andrew Solomon
#67. I think a lot of the time people assume that their values are universal. And they don't understand which aspects of their values are actually universal and which aspects are very specific.
Andrew Solomon
#68. It is the sincere horror of it that gets others motivated, so say Watson and Andrews; the dysfunction caused by the onset of depression may serve a useful function in that it is a device for the elicitation of altruism.
Andrew Solomon
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. We cannot bear a pointless torment, but we can endure great pain if we believe that it's purposeful.
Andrew Solomon
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. I felt like all of the work was training for just one central idea: Accept your child for who he is. I'm not saying that I've done a brilliant job with that. But I've done my best.
Andrew Solomon
#75. And I found out about the wonderful world of sign language. I suddenly realized: If we as a society recognize Jewish culture, gay culture and Latino culture, we must recognize that this is a coherent culture, too. I think deafness is a disability for social constructionist reasons.
Andrew Solomon
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. In depression, the meaninglessness of every enterprise and every emotion, the meaninglessness of life itself, becomes self-evident. The only feeling left in this loveless state is insignificance. Life
Andrew Solomon
#81. Perhaps the immutable error of parenthood is that we give our children what we wanted, whether they want it or not. We heal our wounds with the love we wish we'd received, but are often blind to the wounds we inflict.
Andrew Solomon
#82. Suicide is a crime of loneliness, and adulated people can be frighteningly alone. Intelligence does not help in these circumstances; brilliance is almost always profoundly isolating.
Andrew Solomon
#83. All that children can properly require of their parents is that they tolerate their own muddled spectrum - that they neither insist on the lie of perfect happiness nor lapse into the slipshod brutality of giving up.
Andrew Solomon
#84. The Church responds to antiquated social realities, and those realities remain much more current in Utah precisely because of the Church.
Andrew Solomon
#85. Life is enriched by difficulty; love is made more acute when it requires exertion.
Andrew Solomon
#86. The more gay people can tell our stories, the more other people will accept gay people.
Andrew Solomon
#87. I look at the rates of suicide among gay teens. They are so, so high for suicide attempts and for completed suicides.
Andrew Solomon
#88. There is no such thing as reproduction, only acts of production.
Andrew Solomon
#89. 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
#90. I believe that organized religion is an ornament to the truth, and that aesthetics are part of its power.
Andrew Solomon
#91. People who are different are constantly dealing with families who don't understand them.
Andrew Solomon
#92. 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
#93. I wish I could tell you which issues will move forward surprisingly fast and which will slip unaccountably backward. There will be surprises in store on both fronts. All I know for sure is that those twenty-six shapes are what we have to defend our liberty and sustain our hope.
Andrew Solomon
#94. I understand why there would be prohibitions on straying from monogamy because of the harm that it does not only to the person who is betrayed, but also to the person who is betraying. "Betray" is a sort of shorthand for what happens.
Andrew Solomon
#95. I just look at my own life, which is full of error as all life is. I have done plenty of things that I am not proud of.
Andrew Solomon
#96. I spent years thinking I had to make a choice between being true to myself and being with a man and not having a family, and trying to live something of a lie and being with a woman and having children ...
Andrew Solomon
#97. 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
#98. We don't seek the painful experiences that hew our identities, but we seek our identities in the wake of painful experiences.
Andrew Solomon
#99. 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
#100. 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.
Andrew Solomon
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