Top 200 Andrew Solomon Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “If some glorious angel descended into my living room and offered to exchange my children for other, better children-brighter, kinder, funnier, more loving, more disciplined, more accomplished-I would clutch the ones I have and, like most parents, pray away the atrocious specter.”

— Andrew Solomon

103. “Psychologically, I will not have to seek far if I decide to kill myself, because in my mind and heart I am more ready for this than for the unplanned daily tribulations that mark off the mornings and afternoons.”

— Andrew Solomon

104. “So many people have asked me what to do for depressed friends and relatives, and my answer is actually simple: blunt their isolation. Do it with cups of tea or with long talks or by sitting in a room nearby and staying silent or in whatever way suits the circumstances, but do that. And do it willingly.”

— Andrew Solomon

105. “The unexamined life is unavailable to the depressed. That is, perhaps, the greatest revelation I have had: not that depression is compelling but that the people who suffer from it may become compelling because of it. I hope that this basic fact will offer sustenance to those who suffer and will inspire patience and love in those who witness that suffering.”

— Andrew Solomon

106. “I believe that organized religion is an ornament to the truth, and that aesthetics are part of its power.”

— Andrew Solomon

107. “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

108. “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

109. “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

110. “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

111. “Depression frequently destroys the power of mind over mood.”

— Andrew Solomon

112. “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

113. “I’m a huge believer in science. But I don’t think it explains everything.”

— Andrew Solomon

114. “You lose the ability to trust anyone, to be touched, to grieve. Eventually, you are simply absent from yourself.”

— Andrew Solomon

115. “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

116. “Oppression sometimes benefits its victims more than its perpetrators.”

— Andrew Solomon

117. “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

118. “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

119. “No one has ever suggested legal protections for ugly people to make up for the misaligned features that will compromise their personal and professional lives. For people disabled by inherent moral perplexity, we offer not support but imprisonment.”

— Andrew Solomon

120. “There is no essential self that lies pure as a vein of gold under the chaos of experience and chemistry. Anything can be changed, and we must understand the human organism as a sequence of selves that succumb to or choose one another.”

— Andrew Solomon

121. “Depression is the flaw in love. If you were married to someone and thought, “Well, if my wife dies, I’ll find another one,” it wouldn’t be love as we know it. 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

122. “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

123. “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.”

— Andrew Solomon

124. “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

125. “Life is most transfixing when you are awake to diversity, not only of ethnicity, ability, gender, belief, and sexuality but also of age and experience. The worst mistake anyone can make is to perceive anyone else as lesser.”

— Andrew Solomon

126. “Actually travel is the opposite of depression. Depression is a curling inward, and travel is an opening outward.”

— Andrew Solomon

127. “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

128. “Sometimes, people end up thankful for what they mourned. You cannot achieve this state by seeking tragedy, but you can keep yourself open more to sorrow’s richness than to unmediated despair. Tragedies with happy endings may be sentimental tripe, or they may be the true meaning of love.”

— Andrew Solomon

129. “Depression claims more years than war, cancer, and AIDS put together. 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. Treatments.”

— Andrew Solomon

130. “You cannot understand the otherness of places you have not encountered. If all young adults were required to spend two weeks in a foreign country, two-thirds of the world’s diplomatic problems could be solved. It wouldn’t matter what country they visited or what they did during their stays.”

— Andrew Solomon

131. “While people argue with one another about the specifics of Freud’s work and blame him for the prejudices of his time, they overlook the fundamental truth of his writing, his grand humility: that we frequently do not know our own motivations in life and are prisoners to what we cannot understand.”

— Andrew Solomon

132. “I know one gay ex-Mormon who is a talented, self-destructive alcoholic. Whenever he is drunk and going on a tear, we are back to the Mormon Church and his being thrown out of the Mormon Church and growing up with this sense of being evil.”

— Andrew Solomon

133. “Therapy allows a person to make sense of the new self he has attained on medication, and to accept the loss of self that occurred during a breakdown. You need to be reborn after a severe episode, and you need to learn the behaviors that may protect against relapse. You need to run your life differently from how you ran it before.”

— Andrew Solomon

134. “Some autistic people may emerge from their condition, but nobody knows when and why.”

— Andrew Solomon

135. “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

136. “I found it very comforting to see that there is no such thing as a completely normal family. People find their way through whatever the differences may be.”

— Andrew Solomon

137. “I realized that I had demanded that my parents accept me but had resisted accepting them.”

— Andrew Solomon

138. “The Church responds to antiquated social realities, and those realities remain much more current in Utah precisely because of the Church.”

— Andrew Solomon

139. “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

140. “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

141. “I understand why there would be prohibitions on straying from monogamy because of the harm that it does not only to the person who is betrayed, but also to the person who is betraying. “Betray” is a sort of shorthand for what happens.”

— Andrew Solomon

142. “After you’ve forged meaning, you need to incorporate that meaning into a new identity, 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 have caused you hurt.”

— Andrew Solomon

143. “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

144. “Every organization does good and bad things.”

— Andrew Solomon

145. “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.”

— Andrew Solomon

146. “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. When it comes, it degrades one’s self and ultimately eclipses the capacity to give or receive affection. 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

147. “The idea of what it is like to lose everything is awful.”

— Andrew Solomon

148. “This book’s conundrum is that most of the families described here have ended up grateful for experiences they would have done anything to avoid.”

— Andrew Solomon

149. “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.”

— Andrew Solomon

150. “Religion is so focused on family. These days, for many people, being gay is also focused on family.”

— Andrew Solomon