Top 200 Andrew Solomon Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Grief is a humble angel who leaves you with strong, clear thoughts and a sense of your own depth. Depression is a demon who leaves you appalled.”

— Andrew Solomon

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

55. “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

56. “It’s a strange poverty of the English language, and indeed, of many other languages, that we use this same word, “depression” to describe how a kid feels when it rains on his birthday, and to describe how somebody feels the minute before they commit suicide.”

— Andrew Solomon

57. “There is no contradiction between loving someone and feeling burdened by that person; indeed, love tends to magnify the burden.”

— Andrew Solomon

58. “I feel, as a matter nearly of faith, that if you have known a certain amount of suffering and have emerged out of it into the light, you are obliged to share that light with as many of the still-beleaguered as possible.”

— Andrew Solomon

59. “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.”

— Andrew Solomon

60. “Mental illness is real illness.”

— Andrew Solomon

61. “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

62. “I think that while I hated being depressed and would hate to be depressed again, I found a way to love my depression. I love it because it forced me to cling to joy. I love it because each day I decide, sometimes gamely, sometimes against the moment’s reason, to cleave to the reasons for living-and that, I think, is a highly privileged rapture.”

— Andrew Solomon

63. “I look at the rates of suicide among gay teens. They are so, so high for suicide attempts and for completed suicides.”

— Andrew Solomon

64. “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

65. “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.”

— Andrew Solomon

66. “The campaign against polygamy, around which a lot of anti-Mormon sentiment was organized, seems horrific to me.”

— Andrew Solomon

67. “Rebuilding of the self in and after depression requires love, insight, work, and, most of all, time.”

— Andrew Solomon

68. “I just look at my own life, which is full of error as all life is. I have done plenty of things that I am not proud of.”

— Andrew Solomon

69. “I think you can’t deny that because the cochlear implant exists, the signing world is shrinking.”

— Andrew Solomon

70. “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

71. “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

72. “Biology is not destiny. There are ways to lead a good life with depression. Indeed, people who learn from their depression can develop a particular moral profundity from the experience, and this is the thing with feathers at the bottom of their box of miseries.”

— Andrew Solomon

73. “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

74. “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

75. “The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality and my life, as I write this, is vital even when sad. I may wake up sometime next year without my mind again; it is not likely to stick around all the time. Meanwhile, however, I have discovered what I would have to call a soul, a part of myself I could never have imagined until one day, seven years ago, when hell came to pay me a surprise visit. It’s a precious discovery.”

— Andrew Solomon

76. “It is easy to keep secrets by being honest in an ironic tone of voice.”

— Andrew Solomon

77. “Life itself seemed so alarmingly exigent, to require so much of the self. It was too difficult to remember and think and express and understand – all things I needed to be able to do to talk. To keep my face animated at the same time was insult added to injury. It was like trying to cook and roller-skate and sing and type all at once.”

— Andrew Solomon

78. “There is neither a cure for nor a way to repair autism. There is no implant like there is for the deaf.”

— Andrew Solomon

79. “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

80. “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.”

— Andrew Solomon

81. “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

82. “Science still won’t explain the mysterious nature of love and despair.”

— Andrew Solomon

83. “She looked at me – I was crying, though she was not – and she took on a tone of gentle reprimand. ‘Don’t think you’re paying me some kind of tribute if you let my death become the great event of your life,’ she said to me. ‘The best tribute you can pay to me as a mother is to go on and have a good and fulfilling life. Enjoy what you have.”

— Andrew Solomon

84. “You feel all the time that you want to do something, that there is some affect unavailable to you, that there’s a physical need of impossible urgency and discomfort for which there is no relief, as though you were constantly vomiting from your stomach but had no mouth.”

— Andrew Solomon

85. “It is too often the quality of happiness that you feel at every moment its fragility, while depression seems when you are in it to be a state that will never pass.”

— Andrew Solomon

86. “Hatred does not obliterate love. Indeed, the two are in constant fellowship.”

— Andrew Solomon

87. “Fixing is the illness model; acceptance is the identity model; which way any family goes reflects their assumptions and resources.”

— Andrew Solomon

88. “It is the aloneness within us made manifest, and it destroys not only connection to others but also the ability to be peacefully alone with oneself.”

— Andrew Solomon

89. “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

90. “Depressed people cannot lead a revolution because depressed people can barely manage to get out of bed and put on their shoes and socks.”

— Andrew Solomon

91. “To wage war on depression is to fight against oneself, and it is important to know that in advance of the battles.”

— Andrew Solomon

92. “In the throws of depression, one reaches a strange point at which it is impossible to see the line between ones own theatricality and the reality of madness. I discovered two conflicting qualities of character. I am melodramatic by nature; on the other hand, I can go out and “seem normal” under the most abnormal of circumstances. 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. Its very confusing.”

— Andrew Solomon

93. “Any community that remains an abstraction is an easy target for prejudice and cruelty, but any community that becomes fully humanized is much harder to treat in that way.”

— Andrew Solomon

94. “The more gay people can tell our stories, the more other people will accept gay people.”

— Andrew Solomon

95. “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

96. “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

97. “I think it’s up to the parents to determine whether what they’re doing is consigning their child to difficulty. It’s not as though they were crippling their children after they were born.”

— Andrew Solomon

98. “The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, and my life, as I write this, is vital.”

— Andrew Solomon

99. “Travel is a set of corrective lenses that helps focus the planet’s blurred reality.”

— Andrew Solomon

100. “Disabled people are protected by fragile laws, and if they are judged to have an identity rather than an illness, they may forfeit those safeguards.”

— Andrew Solomon