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Life is enriched by difficulty; love is made more acute when it requires exertion.
Andrew Solomon -
Identity itself should be not a smug label or a gold medal but a revolution.
Andrew Solomon
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Parenthood abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger.
Andrew Solomon -
Though many schizophrenics become curiously attached to their delusions, the fading of the nondelusional world puts them in loneliness beyond all reckoning, a fixed residence on a noxious private planet they can never leave, and where they can receive no visitors.
Andrew Solomon -
There is also somehow the idea that this gay thing is all just about indulgence in carnal pleasure. When I was twenty and felt that nobody could know I was gay, I was having sex with strangers in public parks. I don't think it was evil exactly, but it wasn't so great either. There was nobody particularly benefiting from it, except, I suppose, to the extent that it gave some pleasure to me and perhaps whomever I was with.
Andrew Solomon -
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 -
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 -
I believe that words are strong, that they can overwhelm what we fear when fear seems more awful than life is good.
Andrew Solomon
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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 -
It is important not to suppress your feelings altogether when you are depressed. It is equally important to avoid terrible arguments or expressions of outrage. You should steer clear of emotionally damaging behavior. People forgive, but it is best not to stir things up to the point at which forgiveness is required. When you are depressed, you need the love of other people, and yet depression fosters actions that destroy that love. Depressed people often stick pins into their own life rafts. The conscious mind can intervene. One is not helpless.
Andrew Solomon -
There is a tendency to dehumanize kids that commit crimes. The system is focused on punishment, not on rehabilitation. These kids are the most misunderstood and most cruelly treated.
Andrew Solomon -
When I remember how unhappy I was in adolescence - about the fact that, though I wasn't really using the term to or for myself, I knew that I was gay - I think, "Oh, if someone then could have shown me just an hour in the life that I have now, I would have made it through all of that misery and despair just fine." The pain lay in thinking that I had a desolate future.
Andrew Solomon -
The idea of what it is like to lose everything is awful.
Andrew Solomon -
The campaign against polygamy, around which a lot of anti-Mormon sentiment was organized, seems horrific to me.
Andrew Solomon
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There is neither a cure for nor a way to repair autism. There is no implant like there is for the deaf.
Andrew Solomon -
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 -
Every organization does good and bad things.
Andrew Solomon -
Depression means that you have no point of view.
Andrew Solomon -
It is nearly impossible to hate anyone whose story you know.
Andrew Solomon -
I felt a funeral in my brain, and mourners to and fro kept treading, treading till I felt that sense was breaking through. And when they all were seated, a service, like a drum, kept beating, beating, till I felt my mind was going numb. And then I heard them lift a box and creak across my soul with those same boots of lead again, then space began to toll, as if the heavens were a bell and being were an ear, and I, and silence, some strange race wrecked, solitary, here. Just then, a plank in reason broke, and I fell down and down and hit a world at every plunge, and finished knowing then.
Andrew Solomon
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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 -
There is a line that I always loved from Lucretius. He said, "The sublime is the art of exchanging easier for more difficult pleasures." The presumption of that formulation is that the more difficult pleasures are actually better than the easier pleasures. That is why one makes the exchange.
Andrew Solomon -
In the subconscious fantasies that make conception look so alluring, it is often ourselves that we would like to see live forever, not someone with a personality of his own.
Andrew Solomon -
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