Top 200 Andrew Solomon Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Oppression sometimes benefits its victims more than its perpetrators.”

— Andrew Solomon

152. “Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and no power is more absolute than parenthood.”

— Andrew Solomon

153. “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

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

— Andrew Solomon

155. “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

156. “I have two nexuses of sadness about the Mormon Church. The first is the effect the Church’s position on homosexuality has on Mormons.”

— Andrew Solomon

157. “It’s deeply humbling to realize that there is no such thing as a society with a purchase on truth.”

— Andrew Solomon

158. “Depression means that you have no point of view.”

— Andrew Solomon

159. “I don’t believe that there is anyone of faith whose faith would not be strengthened by those experiences of family.”

— Andrew Solomon

160. “The absence of marriages will result in all kinds of financial burdens that gay people wouldn’t face if they could get married.”

— Andrew Solomon

161. “The things that save you are as frequently trivial as monumental.”

— Andrew Solomon

162. “The parental predisposition to love prevails in the most harrowing of circumstances.”

— Andrew Solomon

163. “Is it depression when I think how I would prefer to go where they have gone, and to stop the maniacal struggle of staying alive? Or is it just a part of life, to keep living in all the ways we cannot stand?”

— Andrew Solomon

164. “A lot of people are very political when they are young, and then they outgrow it.”

— Andrew Solomon

165. “I hate the comparative idea that you have to love your spouse more than you love your parents.”

— Andrew Solomon

166. “In depression, the meaninglessness of every enterprise and every emotion, the meaninglessness of life itself, becomes self-evident. The only feeling left in this loveless state is insignificance. Life.”

— Andrew Solomon

167. “You can exorcise the demons of schizophrenics who perceive that there’s something foreign inside them. But it’s much harder with depressed people because we believe we are seeing the truth. But the truth lies.”

— Andrew Solomon

168. “Life is fraught with sorrows: no matter what we do, we will in the end die; we are, each of us, held in the solitude of an autonomous body; time passes, and what has been will never be again.”

— Andrew Solomon

169. “Being gay is immutable.”

— Andrew Solomon

170. “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

171. “I had always thought of myself as fairly tough and fairly strong and fairly able to cope with anything. And then I had a series of personal losses. My mother died. A relationship that I was in came to end, and a variety of other things went awry.”

— Andrew Solomon

172. “Having anticipated the onward march of our selfish genes, many of us are unprepared for children who present unfamiliar needs. Parenthood abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger, and the more alien the stranger, the stronger the whiff of negativity.”

— Andrew Solomon

173. “The monolithic problem of depression cannot be expressed with a monolithic response; depressions are contextual and must be interpreted within the contexts in which they occur.”

— Andrew Solomon

174. “I think what the Church should ideally do, and does appear to do in the context of straight relationships, is to support people in crossing from the easier pleasure of momentary carnal satisfaction, into the more difficult pleasure of love and family and relationship.”

— Andrew Solomon

175. “I believe that words are strong, that they can overwhelm what we fear when fear seems more awful than life is good. I have turned, with an increasingly fine attention, to love. Love is the other way forward. They need to go together: by themselves pills are a weak poison, love a blunt knife, insight a rope that snaps under too much strain. With the lot of them, if you are lucky, you can save the tree from the vine.”

— Andrew Solomon

176. “I think an awful lot of the diplomatic problems that exist in the world come from people assuming that their society is the one with a purchase on truth.”

— Andrew Solomon

177. “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

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

— Andrew Solomon

179. “I had always wanted to have children, so it caused me a lot of grief when I was younger, and I had supposed that gay people could not be parents.”

— Andrew Solomon

180. “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

181. “We see people of kindness, compassion, and possibly even faith being told, “Because of a characteristic with which you were born, you are evil and bad.” Anything that even implies such a stance is profoundly toxic.”

— Andrew Solomon

182. “Despair is part of love.”

— Andrew Solomon

183. “It is the sincere horror of it that gets others motivated, so say Watson and Andrews; the dysfunction caused by the onset of depression may serve a useful function in that it is “a device for the elicitation of altruism.”

— Andrew Solomon

184. “My goal is to stay safely in between self-analysis and self-destruction.”

— Andrew Solomon

185. “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

186. “I was overpowered by being in the world, by other people and their lives I couldn’t lead, their jobs I couldn’t do – overpowered even by jobs I would never want or need to do.”

— Andrew Solomon

187. “If you stimulate seizures in an animal every day, the seizures eventually become automatic; the animal will go on having them once a day even if you withdraw the stimulation. In much the same way, the brain that has gone into depression a few times will continue to return to depression over and over. This suggests that depression, even if it is occasioned by external tragedy, ultimately changes the structure, as well as the biochemistry, of the brain.”

— Andrew Solomon

188. “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

189. “I understood that going where I would actually be foreign might distract people from the more intimate nature of my defining otherness.”

— Andrew Solomon

190. “In these xenophobic times, when politicians are stoking everyone’s anxiety about threats from abroad, I would argue that engaging with the rest of the world is not only a luxury, in the way that travel is, but actually a moral responsibility.”

— Andrew Solomon

191. “I had known a couple of people who had died, but the loss of my mother contained something of the profoundly unknowable.”

— Andrew Solomon

192. “I didn’t particularly want to die but I also didn’t at all want to live.”

— Andrew Solomon

193. “With children who have never said a word, parents tend to assume, for better or for worse, that there isn’t any language there.”

— Andrew Solomon

194. “When a church manipulates the law to say, “These people are lesser,” it takes a lot of resilience to hold your head up and say, “I am not lesser!” Some people can do it and some cannot; and some of those people who cannot will be destroyed.”

— Andrew Solomon

195. “There is a great deal of sin that comes from homosexuals who believe their homosexuality is a sin.”

— Andrew Solomon

196. “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

197. “There is no life that does not have the material for despair in it, but some people go too close to the edge and others manage to stay sometimes sad in a safe clearing far from the cliffs.”

— Andrew Solomon

198. “At the end of the day, will God be interested primarily in whether I have been kind and helped others, or in whether I was baptized and how?”

— Andrew Solomon

199. “In typical circumstances, to have children who won’t care for you in your dotage is to be King Lear. Disability changes the reciprocity equation.”

— Andrew Solomon

200. “I do think that if the Church can see its way to greater tolerance, Church members will have greater exposure to gay people, and the lives of those gay people will be better.”

— Andrew Solomon