Top 200 Andrew Solomon Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “You lose the ability to trust anyone, to be touched, to grieve. Eventually, you are simply absent from yourself.”

— Andrew Solomon

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

— Andrew Solomon

103. “Exercise because it’s good for you even if every step weighs a thousand pounds.”

— Andrew Solomon

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

108. “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

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

113. “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

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

— Andrew Solomon

115. “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

116. “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

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

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

— Andrew Solomon

121. “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

122. “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

123. “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

124. “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

125. “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

126. “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

127. “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

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

— Andrew Solomon

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

— Andrew Solomon

130. “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

131. “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

132. “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

133. “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

134. “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

135. “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

136. “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

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

— Andrew Solomon

138. “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

139. “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

140. “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

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

— Andrew Solomon

142. “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

143. “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

144. “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

145. “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

146. “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

147. “I hope the Church will examine what is good and what is ill, and what good could be achieved by getting the suicidal, self-destructive, possibly carnal, or celibate to move toward this experience of love.”

— Andrew Solomon

148. “For some parents of children with horizontal identities, acceptance reaches its apogee when parents conclude that while they supposed they were pinioned by a great and catastrophic loss of hope, they were in fact falling in love with someone they didn’t yet know enough to want.”

— Andrew Solomon

149. “I encounter a lot of prejudice and a lot of darkness. I have to negotiate constantly through situations that are uncomfortable or difficult or strange.”

— Andrew Solomon

150. “I was in fact anxious about whether I would be any good at being a father. And then I met so many people who had been good parents under difficult circumstances, and I felt inspired by them.”

— Andrew Solomon