Andrew Solomon Quotes
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Listen to the people who love you. Believe that they are worth living for even when you don't believe it. Seek out the memories depression takes away and project them into the future. Be brave; be strong; take your pills. Exercise because it's good for you even if every step weighs a thousand pounds. Eat when food itself disgusts you. Reason with yourself when you have lost your reason.
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'I'm not responsible for my child and who she's become, but I am responsible to her, and she is a wonderful person. I love her. I don't know if you need to know anything else, but that's all I need to know.' -Carol
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Treating an identity as an illness invites real illness to make a braver stand.
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Oppression breeds the power to oppose it.
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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.
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We live in the right time, even if it doesn't always feel like it.
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If you don't want to have gay weddings in Mormon churches, that's fine. That's absolutely up to the members of the faith or the leadership of the faith. I would never suggest that the Mormon Church has to consecrate gay unions. But homosexuality runs at a fairly constant rate through all populations. There are many gay Mormons.
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Having always imagined myself in a fairly slim minority, I suddenly saw that I was in a vast company. Difference unites us. While each of these experiences can isolate those who are affected, together they compose an aggregate of millions whose struggles connect them profoundly. The exceptional is ubiquitous; to be entirely typical is the rare and lonely state.
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I had known a couple of people who had died, but the loss of my mother contained something of the profoundly unknowable.
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Our needs are our greatest asset. It turns out I've learned to give all the things that I need.
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The absence of words is the absence of intimacy. There are experiences that are starved for language.
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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.
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Depression is the flaw in love. There's no such thing as love without the anticipation of loss. And that specter of despair can be the engine of intimacy.
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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.
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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.
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If someone says: "I don't want to have a cochlear implant, because I want my child to grow up with a rich sense of deaf culture," he must acknowledge that the deaf culture that exists in the world today has a different scale than the deaf culture that's likely to exist in the world 50 years from now.
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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.
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One of the things that often gets lost in discussions of depression is that you know it's ridiculous. You know it's ridiculous while you're experiencing it. You know that most people manage to listen to their messages, and eat lunch, and organise themselves to take a shower and go out the front door, and that it's not a big deal. And yet you are nonetheless in its grip and you are unable to figure out any way around it.
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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.
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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.
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The more gay people can tell our stories, the more other people will accept gay people.
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Identity itself should be not a smug label or a gold medal but a revolution.
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When you banish the dragons you banish the heroes.
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The way that Russian Orthodox services work generally, and certainly the way that this worked, is that it goes on for hours and hours, and people wander in and wander out, and people talk the whole way through. One of the American women said to the other, "This is so beautiful. I can actually imagine maybe even becoming Orthodox." She went on and on, and finally a Russian seated just in front of her turned and said, "You are not member of church because it is beautiful; you are member of church because it is the single truth of God!"