Andrew Solomon Quotes
-
Ease makes less of an impression on us than struggle.
-
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.
-
We cannot bear a pointless torment, but we can endure great pain if we believe that it's purposeful.
-
While people argue with one another about the specifics of Freud's work and blame him for the prejudices of his time, they overlook the fundamental truth of his writing, his grand humility: that we frequently do not know our own motivations in life and are prisoners to what we cannot understand. We can recognize only a small fragment of our own, and an even smaller fragment of anyone else's, impetus.
-
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.
-
I believe that organized religion is an ornament to the truth, and that aesthetics are part of its power.
-
Parenthood abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger, and the more alien the stranger, the stronger the whiff of negativity. We depend on the guarantee in our children's faces that we will not die. Children whose defining quality annihilates that fantasy of immortality are a particular insult; we must love them for themselves, and not for the best of ourselves in them, and that is a great deal harder to do. Loving our own children is an exercise for the imagination.
-
Parenthood always involves recognizing your child as separate and different from you.
-
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.
-
Science still won't explain the mysterious nature of love and despair.
-
I think you can't deny that because the cochlear implant exists, the signing world is shrinking.
-
I did grow up in a household in which I felt that to be myself was to damage the people I loved.
-
I have two nexuses of sadness about the Mormon Church. The first is the effect the Church's position on homosexuality has on Mormons.
-
The Church responds to antiquated social realities, and those realities remain much more current in Utah precisely because of the Church.
-
I love to communicate, and I love music. That's why I always thought not being able to hear would be a tragedy.
-
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?
-
It is easy to keep secrets by being honest in an ironic tone of voice.
-
The strengthening of faith, I think, is the ultimate goal of organized religion altogether.
-
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.
-
Labeling a child's mind as diseased-whether with autism, intellectual disabilities, or transgenderism-may reflect the discomfort that mind gives parents more than any discomfort it causes their child. Much gets corrected that might better have been left alone.
-
It is nearly impossible to hate anyone whose story you know.
-
Antonio Gramsci said that social reformers should have pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will. This means that one must have the intellectual ability to see how bad things are and the emotional ability to look forward with hope. It's a hard combination to sustain, but if you can do it, you can change the world.
-
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.
-
I'd had a vaguely Jewish upbringing, but no deep connection to faith.