Top 200 Andrew Solomon Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, and it was vitality that seemed to seep away from me in that moment.”

— Andrew Solomon

2. “It is nearly impossible to hate anyone whose story you know.”

— Andrew Solomon

3. “Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance.”

— Andrew Solomon

4. “Depression is the flaw in love. There’s no such thing as love without the anticipation of loss. And that specter of despair can be the engine of intimacy.”

— Andrew Solomon

5. “When you banish the dragons you banish the heroes.”

— Andrew Solomon

6. “Listen to the people who love you. Believe that they are worth living for even when you don’t believe it.”

— Andrew Solomon

7. “We cannot bear a pointless torment, but we can endure great pain if we believe that it’s purposeful.”

— Andrew Solomon

8. “I don’t accept subtractive models of love, only additive ones. And I believe that in the same way we need species diversity to ensure that the planet can go on, so we need this diversity of affection and diversity of family in order to strengthen the ecosphere of kindness.”

— Andrew Solomon

9. “Your gender identity is who you are. Sexual identity is who you bounce that off of.”

— Andrew Solomon

10. “Oppression breeds the power to oppose it.”

— Andrew Solomon

11. “Life is enriched by difficulty; love is made more acute when it requires exertion.”

— Andrew Solomon

12. “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.”

— Andrew Solomon

13. “We live in the right time, even if it doesn’t always feel like it.”

— Andrew Solomon

14. “Our needs are our greatest asset. It turns out I’ve learned to give all the things that I need.”

— Andrew Solomon

15. “The absence of words is the absence of intimacy. There are experiences that are starved for language.”

— Andrew Solomon

16. “That, in essence, is the catastrophe of suicide for those who survive: not only the loss of someone, but the loss of the chance to persuade that person to act differently, the loss of the chance to connect.”

— Andrew Solomon

17. “Living with depression is like trying to keep your balance while you dance with a goat – it is perfectly sane to prefer a partner with a better sense of balance.”

— Andrew Solomon

18. “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

19. “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

20. “Loving our own children is an exercise for the imagination.”

— Andrew Solomon

21. “Ease makes less of an impression on us than struggle.”

— Andrew Solomon

22. “I can see the beauty of glass objects fully at the moment when they slip from my hand.”

— Andrew Solomon

23. “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.”

— Andrew Solomon

24. “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

25. “We don’t seek the painful experiences that hew our identities, but we seek our identities in the wake of painful experiences.”

— Andrew Solomon

26. “If you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you.”

— Andrew Solomon

27. “Fold the worst events of your life into a narrative of triumph.”

— Andrew Solomon

28. “When I was younger, not being accepted made me enraged, but now, I am not inclined to dismantle my history. If you banish the dragons, you banish the heroes-and we become attached to the heroic strain in our personal history.”

— Andrew Solomon

29. “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

30. “When you believe that you cannot stitch your own heart back together, go to work on the hearts of other people; there is no surer way to repair yourself than to repair them.”

— Andrew Solomon

31. “There is a tendency to dehumanize kids that commit crimes. The system is focused on punishment, not on rehabilitation. These kids are the most misunderstood and most cruelly treated.”

— Andrew Solomon

32. “Parenthood always involves recognizing your child as separate and different from you.”

— Andrew Solomon

33. “The strengthening of faith, I think, is the ultimate goal of organized religion altogether.”

— Andrew Solomon

34. “Other illnesses, from alcoholism to heart disease, mask depression when it causes them; if one takes that into consideration, depression may be the biggest killer on earth.”

— Andrew Solomon

35. “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

36. “The worst of depression lies in a present moment that cannot escape the past it idealizes or deplores.”

— Andrew Solomon

37. “Kids with Down syndrome are, by and large, quite affectionate and relatively guileless, and frequently, the attachments to them grow and deepen. And the meaning that parents find in it grows and deepens.”

— Andrew Solomon

38. “If you are married and you go off and have an affair with someone, if you are a husband who does that, it may potentially hurt your wife enormously. But it seems to me likely also to compromise your marriage. That seems to me to be a harm.”

— Andrew Solomon

39. “I believe that words are strong, that they can overwhelm what we fear when fear seems more awful than life is good.”

— Andrew Solomon

40. “Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance. It is tumbleweed distress that thrives on thin air, growing despite its detachment from the nourishing earth. It can be described only in metaphor and allegory.”

— Andrew Solomon

41. “I tend to find the ecstasy hidden in ordinary joys because I did not expect those joys to be ordinary to me.”

— Andrew Solomon

42. “Suicide is a crime of loneliness, and adulated people can be frighteningly alone. Intelligence does not help in these circumstances; brilliance is almost always profoundly isolating.”

— Andrew Solomon

43. “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.”

— Andrew Solomon

44. “I hated being depressed, but it was also in depression that I learned my own acreage, the full extent of my soul.”

— Andrew Solomon

45. “You need to take the traumas and make them part of who you’ve come to be, and you need to fold the worst events of your life into a narrative of triumph, evincing a better self in response to things that hurt.”

— Andrew Solomon

46. “Though many of us take pride in how different we are from our parents, we are endlessly sad at how different our children are from us.”

— Andrew Solomon

47. “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

48. “Identity itself should be not a smug label or a gold medal but a revolution.”

— Andrew Solomon

49. “Treating an identity as an illness invites real illness to make a braver stand.”

— Andrew Solomon

50. “Listen to the people who love you. Believe that they are worth living for even when you don’t believe it. Seek out the memories depression takes away and project them into the future. Be brave; be strong; take your pills. Exercise because it’s good for you even if every step weighs a thousand pounds. Eat when food itself disgusts you. Reason with yourself when you have lost your reason.”

— Andrew Solomon