Andrew Solomon Quotes

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

The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, and it was vitality that seemed to seep out of me.

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

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

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.

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

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

We don't seek the painful experiences that hew our identities, but we seek our identities in the wake of painful experiences.

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

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?

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.

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

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 you banish the dragons you banish the heroes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

People … don't want to be cured or changed or eliminated. They want to be whoever it is that they've come to be.

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.

Exercise because it's good for you even if every step weighs a thousand pounds.

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

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.

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

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

Parenthood abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger.

We live in the right time, even if it doesn't always feel like it.

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.

I'd had a vaguely Jewish upbringing, but no deep connection to faith.

I have spent a lot of my life trying to do good and be a humanitarian, to write about difficult places, and to tell the story of oppressed peoples.

I did grow up in a household in which I felt that to be myself was to damage the people I loved.

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

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.

Despair is part of love.

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.

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.

I think you can't deny that because the cochlear implant exists, the signing world is shrinking.

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.

The tragedies that are being brought about vastly outweigh the benefits that are being achieved.

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

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

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

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