Andrew Solomon Quotes
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Fixing is the illness model; acceptance is the identity model; which way any family goes reflects their assumptions and resources.
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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.
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Every organization does good and bad things.
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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.
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I look at the rates of suicide among gay teens. They are so, so high for suicide attempts and for completed suicides.
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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.
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One of the things that frequently gets lost in descriptions of depression is that the depressed person often knows that it is a ludicrous condition to feel so disabled by the ordinary business of quotidian life.
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I think you can't deny that because the cochlear implant exists, the signing world is shrinking.
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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.
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Despair is part of love.
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I tend to find the ecstasy hidden in ordinary joys, because I did not expect those joys to be ordinary to me.
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I grew up in a very rationalist household. My father, in particular, came from that mid-century tradition of thinking science will ultimately explain everything.
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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.
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I hated being depressed, but it was also in depression that I learned my own acreage, the full extent of my soul.
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I have two nexuses of sadness about the Mormon Church. The first is the effect the Church's position on homosexuality has on Mormons.
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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.
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There is a false moral imperative that seems to be all-around us that treatment of depression, the medications and so on, are an artifice, and that it's not natural. And I think that's very misguided. It would be natural for people's teeth to fall out, but there is nobody militating against toothpaste, at least not in my circles.
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Some autistic people may emerge from their condition, but nobody knows when and why.
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I believe that organized religion is an ornament to the truth, and that aesthetics are part of its power.
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Ease makes less of an impression on us than struggle.
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Your gender identity is who you are. Sexual identity is who you bounce that off of.
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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.
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The absence of marriages will result in all kinds of financial burdens that gay people wouldn't face if they could get married. If my brother gets hit by a car tomorrow, my sister-in-law will go on living materially in the same way that she does now. If the same thing happens to me, a great deal of what I have will go off to the taxman. That's because of one of, as you doubtless know, eleven hundred federal laws that favor marriage.
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One has to weigh all of one's values always in relative terms. On the upside, you get people who are not acting on their homosexual attraction, who are avoiding the sin of practicing homosexuality. On the downside, you have destroyed marriages, traumatized children, and dead people who have taken their own lives.