Andrew Solomon Quotes

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

Loving our own children is an exercise for the imagination.

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

I love to communicate, and I love music. That's why I always thought not being able to hear would be a tragedy.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Science still won't explain the mysterious nature of love and despair.

If the Mormon Church still supported polygamy, and if it appeared to be a system that was not exploitative of women, I wouldn't feel that it's my place to forbid it.

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.

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.

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

The strengthening of faith, I think, is the ultimate goal of organized religion altogether.

There is a tendency to dehumanize kids that commit crimes. The system is focused on punishment, not on rehabilitation. These kids are the most misunderstood and most cruelly treated.

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

Oppression breeds the power to oppose it.

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.

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.

All parenting turns on a crucial question: to what extent parents should accept their children for who they are, and to what extent they should help them become their best selves.

Ease makes less of an impression on us than struggle.

Identity itself should be not a smug label or a gold medal but a revolution.

I'm a huge believer in science. But I don't think it explains everything.

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

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.

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.

I like the relative literacy of at least some of England. I mean, I didn't come for the food or the weather!

Depression means that you have no point of view.

If your love didn't always contain the possibility of loss, it would be very different from human love as we know it.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Every organization does good and bad things.

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

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.

There is no such thing as reproduction, only acts of production.

I chose fat and functional over slender and miserable.

There is so much pain in the world, and most of these people keep theirs secret, rolling through agonizing lives in invisible wheelchairs, dressed in invisible bodycasts.

If you banish the dragons, you banish the heroes...

Travel is a set of corrective lenses that helps focus the planet's blurred reality.

Those who believe their suffering has been valuable love more readily than those who see no meaning in their pain. Suffering does not necessarily imply love, but love implies suffering

As you ripen, you’ll notice that time is the weirdest thing in the world, that these surprises are relentless, and that getting older is not a stroll but an ambush.

Parenting is no sport for perfectionists.

Dealing with depression effectively is a mark not of weakness, but of strength.

Travel is an exercise partly in broadening yourself and partly in defining your own limits.