Andrew Solomon Quotes
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We cannot bear a pointless torment, but we can endure great pain if we believe that it's purposeful.
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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.
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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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People … don't want to be cured or changed or eliminated. They want to be whoever it is that they've come to be.
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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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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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I think you can't deny that because the cochlear implant exists, the signing world is shrinking.
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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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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 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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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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Some autistic people may emerge from their condition, but nobody knows when and why.
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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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My parents deeply and truly loved each other, and if my mother hadn't died they would have been together forever. They were together for as much of forever as was given to them. They really loved my brother and me and were very good to us. It gave the model of how to have a happy marriage and family, but it also set the bar very high.
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Ease makes less of an impression on us than struggle.
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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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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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I believe that organized religion is an ornament to the truth, and that aesthetics are part of its power.
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Your gender identity is who you are. Sexual identity is who you bounce that off of.
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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.
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Parenthood always involves recognizing your child as separate and different from you.
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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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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?