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I started this book to forgive my parents and ended it by becoming a parent. Understanding backward liberated me to live forward.
Andrew Solomon -
I think morality is more important than ever before. As we gain more power, the question of what we do with it becomes more and more crucial, and we are very close to really having divine powers of creation and destruction. The future of the entire ecological system and the future of the whole of life is really now in our hands. And what to do with it is an ethical question and also a scientific question.
Andrew Solomon
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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 -
I look at the rates of suicide among gay teens. They are so, so high for suicide attempts and for completed suicides.
Andrew Solomon -
I hated being depressed, but it was also in depression that I learned my own acreage, the full extent of my soul.
Andrew Solomon -
If I understand correctly, part of the objection to homosexuality used to have to do with the fact that gay people didn't reproduce. Part of it seems to have to do, as a lot of Christian resistance to gayness does, with a dim view of sex that is not procreative, and that is therefore lascivious.
Andrew Solomon -
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 -
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
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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 -
I was overpowered by being in the world, by other people and their lives I couldn’t lead, their jobs I couldn’t do - overpowered even by jobs I would never want or need to do.
Andrew Solomon -
Being gay is immutable.
Andrew Solomon -
Religion is so focused on family. These days, for many people, being gay is also focused on family.
Andrew Solomon -
Science still won't explain the mysterious nature of love and despair.
Andrew Solomon -
We cannot bear a pointless torment, but we can endure great pain if we believe that it's purposeful.
Andrew Solomon
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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 -
Parenthood always involves recognizing your child as separate and different from you.
Andrew Solomon -
Kids with Down syndrome are, by and large, quite affectionate and relatively guileless, and frequently, the attachments to them grow and deepen. And the meaning that parents find in it grows and deepens.
Andrew Solomon -
Mild depression is a gradual and sometimes permanent thing that undermines people the way rust weakens iron ... Like physical pain that becomes chronic, it is miserable not so much because it is intolerable in the moment as because it is intolerable to have known it in the moments gone and to look forward only to knowing it in the moments to come.
Andrew Solomon -
Fixing is the illness model; acceptance is the identity model; which way any family goes reflects their assumptions and resources.
Andrew Solomon -
I did grow up in a household in which I felt that to be myself was to damage the people I loved.
Andrew Solomon
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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 -
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 -
I met people on college campuses who were defining themselves as genderqueer to express revolutionary feelings, or to communicate their individuality; they were gender fluid without being gender dysphoric. This phenomenon may be culturally significant, but it has only a little bit in common with the people who feel they can have no authentic self in their birth gender.
Andrew Solomon -
Exercise because it's good for you even if every step weighs a thousand pounds.
Andrew Solomon