Andrew Solomon Quotes
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I'm not studying everything that can go wrong. What I'm studying is how much love there can be, even when everything appears to be going wrong.
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I believe very deeply that this beauty I call the soul is not a random occurrence. I don't know what its meaning is at some larger level, but I know that it has meaning.
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At the end of the day, will God be interested primarily in whether I have been kind and helped others, or in whether I was baptized and how?
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I had always wanted to have children, so it caused me a lot of grief when I was younger, and I had supposed that gay people could not be parents.
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When a church manipulates the law to say, "These people are lesser," it takes a lot of resilience to hold your head up and say, "I am not lesser!" Some people can do it and some cannot; and some of those people who cannot will be destroyed.
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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.
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If some glorious angel suddenly descended through my living room ceiling and offered to take away the children I have and give me other, better children — more polite, funnier, nicer, smarter — I would cling to the children I have and pray away that atrocious spectacle.
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I have a very difficult time believing that there is some being who is going to invite me into heaven or not on the basis of whether I wear a yarmulke or whether I have been sprinkled with water while someone said something. Some of the ritual is very beautiful, but I find it difficult to believe that it really has to do with God. I believe that dogma comes from man.
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It's deeply humbling to realize that there is no such thing as a society with a purchase on truth.
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You don't think in depression that you've put on a gray veil and are seeing the world through the haze of a bad mood. You think that the veil has been taken away, the veil of happiness, and that now you're seeing truly.
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I'm a huge believer in science. But I don't think it explains everything.
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Being in a marriage and having children is the greatest pleasure, but it is certainly not the easiest pleasure. It is not like eating ice cream.
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The idea of anyone contemplating our family and witnessing the affection that we all have for one another and seeing evil in it is deeply hurtful and sad; and also deeply bewildering.
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The world changed, and the idea of having a family became feasible for homosexuals. But I was still left with the question as to what it would be like for a child to grow up with gay parents.
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Penalizing homosexuals does not save any innocent victims. The idea that God and the Church accept these people while they are celibate; and then if they go off and do something with someone else and both derive joy from it without any apparent harm to anyone else, the Church excommunicates them - that, to me, is bizarre.
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I grew up feeling that to be gay was a tragedy. I didn't grow up thinking that it was morally wrong, but I grew up thinking that it would make me marginal, prevent me from having children, and quite possibly prevent me from having a meaningful long relationship. It seemed that this condition would leave me with a vastly reduced life.
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I would certainly not want my child to be schizophrenic. I wouldn't want him or her to be a criminal either. If, on the other hand, I had a deaf child, it would help that I have developed a real admiration for Deaf culture.
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I'd had a vaguely Jewish upbringing, but no deep connection to faith.
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I felt like all of the work was training for just one central idea: Accept your child for who he is. I'm not saying that I've done a brilliant job with that. But I've done my best.
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The experience of being depressed and emerging from depression made me understand the idea of a soul. I felt that the language in which one could best acknowledge that drew from faith.
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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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There is no question that abuse, drugs and exposure to violence at home can exacerbate someone's criminal tendencies enormously. But there are many, many criminals who don't come from that background.
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It does seem to me, though, that there is a difference between the Mormon Church saying, "We don't accept gay people within the Church; we don't accept gay marriage within the Church; we don't accept people who act on their homosexual desires within the Church;" and trying to interfere with what happens outside of the Church. That seemed to me to be an abomination.
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I don't understand what the nature of God is. But I do have the feeling that I'm at some feet, and lucky to be there.