Andrew Solomon Best 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

Mothering requires two impulses- the impulse to hold on, and the impulse to push away. — Andrew Solomon

I got into my first serious relationship with a man when I was twenty-three. I had, before that, sort of a typical, sad history of relatively promiscuous sexual encounters with men I didn't know, because I felt that if I were involved with people I did know, other people would know that I was gay, and it was something that I needed to keep so secret. — Andrew Solomon

It is important not to suppress your feelings altogether when you are depressed. It is equally important to avoid terrible arguments or expressions of outrage. You should steer clear of emotionally damaging behavior. People forgive, but it is best not to stir things up to the point at which forgiveness is required. When you are depressed, you need the love of other people, and yet depression fosters actions that destroy that love. Depressed people often stick pins into their own life rafts. The conscious mind can intervene. One is not helpless. — Andrew Solomon

I have always believed in trying to be a good person and giving to the world, and treating others in a just, kind, merciful way. — 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

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

I don't believe that there is anyone of faith whose faith would not be strengthened by those experiences of family. — Andrew Solomon

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

You are constantly told in depression that your judgment is compromised, but a part of depression is that it touches cognition. That you are having a breakdown does not mean that your life isn't a mess. If there are issues you have successfully skirted or avoided for years, they come cropping back up and stare you full in the face, and one aspect of depression is a deep knowledge that the comforting doctors who assure you that your judgment is bad are wrong. You are in touch with the real terribleness of your life. You can accept rationally that later, after the medication sets in, you will be better able to deal with the terribleness, but you will not be free of it. When you are depressed, the past and future are absorbed entirely by the present moment, as in the world of a three-year-old. You cannot remember a time when you felt better, at least not clearly; and you certainly cannot imagine a future time when you will feel better. — Andrew Solomon

John [the father] kept saying, "You have a penis. That means you're a boy." One day, Shannon noticed that her son had been in the bathroom an awfully long time and pushed the door open. "He had a pair of my best, sharpest sewing scissors poised, ready to cut. Penis in the scissors. I said, 'What are you doing?' He said, 'This doesn't belong here. So I'm going to cut it off.' I said, 'You can't do that.' He said, 'Why not?' I said, 'Because if you ever want to have girl parts, they need that to make them.' I pulled that one right out of my ass. He handed me the scissors and said, 'Okay. — Andrew Solomon

A large proportion of my best friends are a little bit crazy ... I try to be cautious with my friends who are too sane. Depression is itself destructive, and it breeds destructive impulses: I am easily disappointed in people who don't get it ... — Andrew Solomon

I think you can't deny that because the cochlear implant exists, the signing world is shrinking. — 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

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. — 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

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

What to say? That I would have loved to make the trip but was busy staying out of the mental hospital? It's so humiliating - so degrading. If I knew I wouldn't get caught, I'd love to lie about it - invent an acceptable cancer, that recurs and vanishes, that people could understand - that wouldn't make them frightened and uncomfortable. — Andrew Solomon

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. — Andrew Solomon

There is no such thing as reproduction, only acts of production. — 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

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. — Andrew Solomon

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. — 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

A witness can be of more value than a policy analyst. An amateur witness, free of conceptual bias, sometimes sees the plainest truth. One should never be blinded by tailoring. — 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

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. — 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

All parenting turns on a crucial question: to what extent parents should accept their children for who they are, and to what extent they should help them become their best selves. — 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

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. — Andrew Solomon

Ease makes less of an impression on us than struggle. — Andrew Solomon

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

Though many schizophrenics become curiously attached to their delusions, the fading of the nondelusional world puts them in loneliness beyond all reckoning, a fixed residence on a noxious private planet they can never leave, and where they can receive no visitors. — 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

I'm attached to my children with whatever flaws they have, and if some glorious angel broke through the living room ceiling and offered to exchange them for other, better children, I'd cling to my kids and pray away this specter. — Andrew Solomon

I like the relative literacy of at least some of England. I mean, I didn't come for the food or the weather! — Andrew Solomon

What has become clear to me is that it is not the inherent nature of being gay that causes such a reduced life; it is, rather, the social circumstances around being gay: the perceptions of it and the cultural norms that it is said to violate. As some of those norms have changed, I have been able to be gay, to have a marriage, to have a family, and to have - if there is wood to knock on - a fortunate and happy life. — 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

I did grow up in a household in which I felt that to be myself was to damage the people I loved. — Andrew Solomon

Being gay is immutable. Maybe someday we'll figure out more of the science and it will be changeable, but we have no leads so far. — Andrew Solomon

I can see the beauty of glass objects fully at the moment when they slip from my hand — Andrew Solomon

My goal is to stay safely in between self-analysis and self-destruction. — Andrew Solomon

People ... don't want to be cured or changed or eliminated. They want to be whoever it is that they've come to be. — 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'd had a vaguely Jewish upbringing, but no deep connection to faith. — 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

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

There is so much pain in the world, and most of these people keep theirs secret, rolling through agonizing lives in invisible wheelchairs, dressed in invisible bodycasts. — Andrew Solomon

If you don't want to have gay weddings in Mormon churches, that's fine. That's absolutely up to the members of the faith or the leadership of the faith. I would never suggest that the Mormon Church has to consecrate gay unions. But homosexuality runs at a fairly constant rate through all populations. There are many gay Mormons. — Andrew Solomon