Andrew Solomon Quotes & Sayings

I regret everything because it has just finished, and already when I was twelve, I lamented the time that had gone by. Even in the best of spirits, it's always been as though I wrestle with the present in a vain effort to stop its becoming the past. — Andrew Solomon

There is a basic emotional spectrum from which we cannot and should not escape, and I believe that depression is in that spectrum, located near not only grief but also love. Indeed I believe that all the strong emotions — Andrew Solomon

Some people are trapped by the belief that love comes in finite quantities, and that our kind of love exhausts the supply upon which they need to draw. I do not accept competitive models of love, only additive ones. — Andrew Solomon

Remember that writing things down makes them real; that it is nearly impossible to hate anyone whose story you know; and, most of all, that even in our post-postmodern era, writing has a moral purpose. With twenty-six shapes arranged in varying patterns, we can tell every story known to mankind, and make up all the new ones - indeed, we can do so in most of the world's known tongues. If you can give language to experiences previously starved for it, you can make the world a better place. — Andrew Solomon

And I found out about the wonderful world of sign language. I suddenly realized: If we as a society recognize Jewish culture, gay culture and Latino culture, we must recognize that this is a coherent culture, too. I think deafness is a disability for social constructionist reasons. — Andrew Solomon

The thing that makes me really outraged, is the idea that the Mormon Church would presume to get involved in decisions that have little to do with Mormonism. — Andrew Solomon

You can't fit in with people by pretending to be just like they are; you fit in by engaging in a dialogue about your differences, and by putting aside the assumption that your way of life is in any way preferable to theirs. — Andrew Solomon

Nirvana occurs when you not only look forward to rapture, but also gaze back into the times of anguish and find in them the seeds of your joy. You may not have felt that happiness at the time, but in retrospect it is incontrovertible. — Andrew Solomon

It is easy to keep secrets by being honest in an ironic tone of voice. — Andrew Solomon

The parental predisposition to love prevails in the most harrowing of circumstances. — Andrew Solomon

Without self-discovery," Hahn wrote, extending an idea of Nietzsche's, "a person may still have self-confidence, but it is a self-confidence built on ignorance and it melts in the face of heavy burdens. — Andrew Solomon

Oppression sometimes benefits its victims more than its perpetrators. — Andrew Solomon

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

It's not nature versus nurture. It's nurturing your nature. — Andrew Solomon

We don't seek the painful experiences that hew our identities, but we seek our identities in the wake of painful experiences. — Andrew Solomon

Disability scholars Andrienne Asch and Erik Parens, in their seminal discussion of the problem, wrote,'Pre-natal diagnosis reinforces the medical model that disability itself, not societal discrimination against people with disabilities, is the problem to be solved. — Andrew Solomon

If you banish the dragons, you banish the heroes ... — Andrew Solomon

I hate the comparative idea that you have to love your spouse more than you love your parents. — Andrew Solomon

If real experience has triggered your descent into depression, you have a human yen to understand it even when you have ceased to experience it; the limited of experience that is achieved with chemical pills is not tantamount to a cure. — Andrew Solomon

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. — Andrew Solomon

If we tolerate prejudice toward any group, we tolerate it toward all groups," he said. "I couldn't have relationships that were conditional on excluding my brother - or anyone else. We are all in one fight, and our freedom is all the same freedom. — Andrew Solomon

I had known a couple of people who had died, but the loss of my mother contained something of the profoundly unknowable. — Andrew Solomon

Oppression breeds the power to oppose it. — Andrew Solomon

I don't believe that raising my voice in song is going to be pleasing to a God who is sitting upstairs somewhere, waiting to be pleased. — Andrew Solomon

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. — Andrew Solomon

I chose fat and functional over slender and miserable. — Andrew Solomon

Religion is so focused on family. These days, for many people, being gay is also focused on family. — Andrew Solomon

I tend to find the ecstasy hidden in ordinary joys because I did not expect those joys to be ordinary to me. — Andrew Solomon

We cannot bear a pointless torment, but we can endure great pain if we believe that it's purposeful. — Andrew Solomon

The Princeton ethicist Peter Singer has espoused the right of women to choose abortion through to the end of pregnancy and to commit infanticide on newborns if they so choose. He has defended this position with the utilitarian argument that most women who eliminate an unwanted child will produce a wanted one, and that the loss of happiness of the child who is killed is outweighed by the happiness of the healthy child who follows. 1zAlthough Singer's position is extreme, it reflects the pervasive devaluation of people with Down's syndrome and the assumption that their lives are displeasing to others and themselves. — Andrew Solomon

The more gay people can tell our stories, the more other people will accept gay people. — Andrew Solomon

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? — 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

Mild depression is a gradual and sometimes permanent thing that undermines people the way rust weakens iron. It is too much grief at too slight a cause, pain that takes over from the other emotions and crowds them out. Such depression takes up bodily occupancy in the eyelids and in the muscles that keep the spine erect. It hurts your heart and lungs, making the contraction of involuntary muscles harder than it needs to be. 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. The present tense of mild depression envisages no alleviation because it feels like knowledge. — Andrew Solomon

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. — Andrew Solomon

Cleaving to our own lives, with all their challenges and limitations and particularities, is vital. — Andrew Solomon

Em unless you got the money to pay. Fred has been given a regimen of meds for HIV, but he stopped — Andrew Solomon

People around depressives expect them to get themselves together: our society has little room in it for moping. Spouses, parents, children, and friends are all subject to being brought down themselves, and they do not want to be close to measureless pain. — Andrew Solomon

It seems particularly ironic that a church that at one stage, a long time ago, fought to redefine marriage should now be so opposed to these attempts to redefine marriage. — 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

Your gender identity is who you are. Sexual identity is who you bounce that off of. — Andrew Solomon

The strengthening of faith, I think, is the ultimate goal of organized religion altogether. — Andrew Solomon

Love is circumstantial; we can love anyone if need be; and losing the one we love is the singular catastrophe. Time does not heal it. Every present moment yearns for even the roughest past. — Andrew Solomon

We live in the right time, even if it doesn't always feel like it. — Andrew Solomon

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. — Andrew Solomon

I'm sure that if we had enough sophistication, someone could look at what my changes in brain structure were as I came to feel more deeply in love. — Andrew Solomon

The absence of marriages will result in all kinds of financial burdens that gay people wouldn't face if they could get married. — Andrew Solomon

Fold the worst events of your life into a narrative of triumph. — Andrew Solomon

The people who succeed despite depression do three things. First, they seek an understanding of what's happening. They they accept that this is a permanent situation. And then they have to transcend their experience and grow from it and put themselves out into the world of real people. — Andrew Solomon

Treating an identity as an illness invites real illness to make a braver stand. — Andrew Solomon

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. — Andrew Solomon

If something or someone doesn't work, it's in a state of grace, progress, and evolution. It will attract love and empathy. If it does work, it has merely completed its job and is probably dead. — Andrew Solomon

I believe that words are strong, that they can overwhelm what we fear when fear seems more awful than life is good. — Andrew Solomon

Our needs are our greatest asset. It turns out I've learned to give all the things that I need. — Andrew Solomon

Being gay is immutable. — Andrew Solomon

The cumulative results of the brain's chemical effects are not well understood. In the 1989 edition of the standard Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, for example, one finds this helpful formula: a depression score is equivalent to the level of 3-methoxy-4-hydroxyphenylglycol (a compound found in the urine of all people and not apparently affected by depression); minus the level of 3-methoxy-4-hydroxymandelic acid; plus the level of norepinephrine; minus the level of normetanephrine plus the level of metanepherine, the sum of those divided by the level of 3-methoxy-4-hydroxymandelic acid; plus an unspecified conversion variable; or, as CTP puts it: "D-type score = C1 (MHPG) - C2 (VMA) + C3 (NE) - C4 (NMN + MN)/VMA + C0." The score should come out between one for unipolar and zero for bipolar patients, so if you come up with something else - you're doing it wrong. — Andrew Solomon

If you wake up feeling no pain, you know you're dead. (Russian expression) — Andrew Solomon

When I remember how unhappy I was in adolescence - about the fact that, though I wasn't really using the term to or for myself, I knew that I was gay - I think, "Oh, if someone then could have shown me just an hour in the life that I have now, I would have made it through all of that misery and despair just fine." The pain lay in thinking that I had a desolate future. — Andrew Solomon

I had thought that when you feel your worst your tears flood, but the very worst pain is the arid pain of total violation that comes after the tears are all used up, the pain that stops up every space through which you once metered the world, or the world, you. This is the presence of major depression. — Andrew Solomon

I believe that organized religion is an ornament to the truth, and that aesthetics are part of its power. — Andrew Solomon

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. — Andrew Solomon

The social perception of whether any supposed deficit is the parents' fault is always a critical factor in the experience of both children and parents. The attribution of responsibility to parents is often a function of ignorance, but it also reflects our anxious belief that we control our own destinies. — Andrew Solomon

No one had forewarned me, however, that if you live abroad any good while, the notion of home is permanently compromised. — Andrew Solomon

Perhaps the immutable error of parenthood is that we give our children what we wanted, whether they want it or not. We heal our wounds with the love we wish we'd received, but are often blind to the wounds we inflict. — Andrew Solomon

Having anticipated the onward march of our selfish genes, many of us are unprepared for children who present unfamiliar needs. Parenthood abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger, and the more alien the stranger, the stronger the whiff of negativity. — Andrew Solomon

All that children can properly require of their parents is that they tolerate their own muddled spectrum - that they neither insist on the lie of perfect happiness nor lapse into the slipshod brutality of giving up. — Andrew Solomon

Psychosis is a gross disturbance in an individual's ability to distinguish self from reality. For schizophrenics, the membrane between imagination and reality is so porous that having an idea and having an experience are not particularly different. — Andrew Solomon

We applaud the great strides made through genetic identification research, however, we do not condone the use of such information for eugenics and related purposes" ... "The question of what lives are worth living is now answered in doctors' offices instead of in Nazis' T-4 programme. The forces of normalisation seem to be gaining ground. — Andrew Solomon

It is the sincere horror of it that gets others motivated, so say Watson and Andrews; the dysfunction caused by the onset of depression may serve a useful function in that it is a device for the elicitation of altruism. — Andrew Solomon

There is neither a cure for nor a way to repair autism. There is no implant like there is for the deaf. — Andrew Solomon

There is a great deal of sin that comes from homosexuals who believe their homosexuality is a sin. — Andrew Solomon

Perhaps depression can best be described as emotional pain that forces itself on us against our will, and then breaks free of its externals. — 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

But you are never the same once you have acquired the knowledge that there is no self that will not crumble. We are told to learn self-reliance, but it's tricky if you have no self on which to rely. — Andrew Solomon

I think a lot of the time people assume that their values are universal. And they don't understand which aspects of their values are actually universal and which aspects are very specific. — Andrew Solomon

The LP actress Linda Hunt once wrote, 'Dwarfism, after all, isn't like cancer or heart disease. It isn't fatal, and it isn't even an illness. It is physical, though, and inescapable. You don't get over it. It is you. But you aren't it, and that's an important distinction. — Andrew Solomon

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. — Andrew Solomon

Antonin Artaud wrote on one of his drawings, "Never real and always true," and that is how depression feels. You know that it is not real, that you are someone else, and yet you know that it is absolutely true. — Andrew Solomon

I'm a huge believer in science. But I don't think it explains everything. — Andrew Solomon

[I]f you live abroad any good while, the notion of home is permanently compromised. You will always be missing another place, and no national logic will ever again seem fully obvious to you. — Andrew Solomon

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. — Andrew Solomon

The Internet," [Judy] Singer said, "is a prosthetic device for people who can't socialize without it." For anyone challenged by language and social rules, a communication system that does not operate in real time is a godsend. — Andrew Solomon

This thought runs like a bright golden thread through the dark tapestry of our sorrow. We learn so much from our children - in patience, in humility, in gratitude for other blessings we had accepted before as a matter of course; so much in tolerance; so much in faith - believing and trusting where we cannot see; so much in compassion for our fellow man; and yes, even so much in wisdom about the eternal values in life. — Andrew Solomon

must love them for themselves, — Andrew Solomon

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. — Andrew Solomon

The idea of what it is like to lose everything is awful. — Andrew Solomon

In typical circumstances, to have children who won't care for you in your dotage is to be King Lear. Disability changes the reciprocity equation. — Andrew Solomon

Love, no matter what. — Andrew Solomon

Depression frequently destroys the power of mind over mood. — Andrew Solomon

The sprinter unwisely indulges his arrogance against the marathon runner, and likewise, parents who encourage their children's narcissism do them no favours. It is best to accomplish something before becoming famous, because if the fame comes first, it often precludes accomplishment ... "You don't build a career by playing Carnegie Hall. You build a career and then Carnegie Hall will invite you to play". — Andrew Solomon

In depression, all that is happening in the present is the anticipation of pain in the future, and the present qua present no longer exists at all. Depression is a condition that is almost unimaginable to anyone who has not known it. — Andrew Solomon

Disability is not predictive of the happiness of either the parent or the child, which reflects the larger puzzle that people who have won the lottery are, in the long run and on average, only marginally happier than amputees - people in each category having adjusted rather quickly to their new normal. — Andrew Solomon

When the child does not conform to this image, the parents often need help in adapting their behavior to the reality - they — Andrew Solomon

One loves and is loved in great pain, and one is alive in the experience of it. It is the walking-death quality of depression that I have tried to eliminate from my life; — Andrew Solomon

If you attach better services to a diagnostic category, some doctors will apply that diagnosis to children from whom it is not entirely appropriate in order to access those services. — Andrew Solomon

I'll tell them all the good things and some difficulties. The parents may never accept what happened to them and yet accept their child. They're two separate things, the parental loss, and the actual person they will almost always end up loving. — Andrew Solomon

If you stimulate seizures in an animal every day, the seizures eventually become automatic; the animal will go on having them once a day even if you withdraw the stimulation. In much the same way, the brain that has gone into depression a few times will continue to return to depression over and over. This suggests that depression, even if it is occasioned by external tragedy, ultimately changes the structure, as well as the biochemistry, of the brain. — Andrew Solomon

You lose the ability to trust anyone, to be touched, to grieve. Eventually, you are simply absent from yourself. — Andrew Solomon

I spent years thinking I had to make a choice between being true to myself and being with a man and not having a family, and trying to live something of a lie and being with a woman and having children ... — Andrew Solomon

Exercise because it's good for you even if every step weighs a thousand pounds. — Andrew Solomon