Andrew Solomon quotes
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You don't think in depression that you've put on a gray veil and are seeing the world through the haze of a bad mood. You think that the veil has been taken away, the veil of happiness, and that now you're seeing truly.
-- Andrew Solomon -
I believe that words are strong, that they can overwhelm what we fear when fear seems more awful than life is good.
-- Andrew Solomon -
The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, and it was vitality that seemed to seep away from me in that moment.
-- Andrew Solomon -
Life is enriched by difficulty; love is made more acute when it requires exertion.
-- Andrew Solomon -
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If some glorious angel suddenly descended through my living room ceiling and offered to take away the children I have and give me other, better children — more polite, funnier, nicer, smarter — I would cling to the children I have and pray away that atrocious spectacle.
-- Andrew Solomon -
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.
-- Andrew Solomon -
Then I repeated these words to my spirits: 'Leave me be; give me peace; and let me do the work of my life. I will never forget you.' Something about that incantation was particularly appealing to me. 'I will never forget you'-- as though one had to address the pride of the spirits, as though one wanted them to feel good about being exorcised.
-- Andrew Solomon -
We don't seek the painful experiences that hew our identities, but we seek our identities in the wake of painful experiences.
-- Andrew Solomon -
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People … don't want to be cured or changed or eliminated. They want to be whoever it is that they've come to be.
-- Andrew Solomon -
Fold the worst events of your life into a narrative of triumph.
-- Andrew Solomon -
Having always imagined myself in a fairly slim minority, I suddenly saw that I was in a vast company. Difference unites us. While each of these experiences can isolate those who are affected, together they compose an aggregate of millions whose struggles connect them profoundly. The exceptional is ubiquitous; to be entirely typical is the rare and lonely state.
-- Andrew Solomon -
Listen to the people who love you. Believe that they are worth living for even when you don't believe it. Seek out the memories depression takes away and project them into the future. Be brave; be strong; take your pills. Exercise because it's good for you even if every step weighs a thousand pounds. Eat when food itself disgusts you. Reason with yourself when you have lost your reason.
-- Andrew Solomon -
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I hated being depressed, but it was also in depression that I learned my own acreage, the full extent of my soul.
-- Andrew Solomon -
Fixing is the illness model; acceptance is the identity model; which way any family goes reflects their assumptions and resources.
-- Andrew Solomon -
It is important not to suppress your feelings altogether when you are depressed. It is equally important to avoid terrible arguments or expressions of outrage. You should steer clear of emotionally damaging behavior. People forgive, but it is best not to stir things up to the point at which forgiveness is required. When you are depressed, you need the love of other people, and yet depression fosters actions that destroy that love. Depressed people often stick pins into their own life rafts. The conscious mind can intervene. One is not helpless.
-- Andrew Solomon -
Kids with Down syndrome are, by and large, quite affectionate and relatively guileless, and frequently, the attachments to them grow and deepen. And the meaning that parents find in it grows and deepens.
-- Andrew Solomon -
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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 -
One of the things that frequently gets lost in descriptions of depression is that the depressed person often knows that it is a ludicrous condition to feel so disabled by the ordinary business of quotidian life.
-- Andrew Solomon -
Absence does not so much make the heart grow fonder as give the heart time to integrate what it has not previously absorbed, time to make sense of what happened too quickly to have any meaning in the instant. This is always true. If it is in absence that people forget each other, it is also in the quiet pause of absence that, minds running in symmetry, people come to know each other; there is sometimes as much intimacy in the span of continents as in the shared hours before dawn.
-- Andrew Solomon -
Your gender identity is who you are. Sexual identity is who you bounce that off of.
-- Andrew Solomon -
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Our needs are our greatest asset. It turns out I've learned to give all the things that I need.
-- Andrew Solomon -
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.
-- Andrew Solomon -
Depression means that you have no point of view.
-- Andrew Solomon -
When you banish the dragons you banish the heroes.
-- Andrew Solomon -
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Listen to the people who love you. Believe that they are worth living for even when you don't believe it.
-- Andrew Solomon -
Exercise because it's good for you even if every step weighs a thousand pounds.
-- Andrew Solomon -
I felt a funeral in my brain, and mourners to and fro kept treading, treading till I felt that sense was breaking through. And when they all were seated, a service, like a drum, kept beating, beating, till I felt my mind was going numb. And then I heard them lift a box and creak across my soul with those same boots of lead again, then space began to toll, as if the heavens were a bell and being were an ear, and I, and silence, some strange race wrecked, solitary, here. Just then, a plank in reason broke, and I fell down and down and hit a world at every plunge, and finished knowing then.
-- Andrew Solomon -
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.
-- Andrew Solomon -
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I can see the beauty of glass objects fully at the moment when they slip from my hand
-- Andrew Solomon -
Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance. It is tumbleweed distress that thrives on thin air, growing despite its detachment from the nourishing earth. It can be described only in metaphor and allegory
-- Andrew Solomon -
I found myself losing interest in almost everything, I didn't want to do any of the things I had previously wanted to do and I didn't know why. Everything there was to do seemed like too much work. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, and it was vitality that seemed to seep away from me in that moment.
-- Andrew Solomon -
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 -
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One of the things that often gets lost in discussions of depression is that you know it's ridiculous. You know it's ridiculous while you're experiencing it. You know that most people manage to listen to their messages, and eat lunch, and organise themselves to take a shower and go out the front door, and that it's not a big deal. And yet you are nonetheless in its grip and you are unable to figure out any way around it.
-- Andrew Solomon -
It is nearly impossible to hate anyone whose story you know.
-- Andrew Solomon -
I don't accept subtractive models of love, only additive ones. And I believe that in the same way we need species diversity to ensure that the planet can go on, so we need this diversity of affection and diversity of family in order to strengthen the ecosphere of kindness
-- Andrew Solomon -
Identity itself should be not a smug label or a gold medal but a revolution.
-- Andrew Solomon -
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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 -
Depressed people cannot lead a revolution because depressed people can barely manage to get out of bed and put on their shoes and socks.
-- Andrew Solomon -
Antonin Artaud wrote on one of his drawings, "Never real and always true," and that is how depression feels. You know that it is not real, that you are someone else, and yet you know that it is absolutely true.
-- Andrew Solomon -
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.
-- Andrew Solomon -
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Parenthood abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger, and the more alien the stranger, the stronger the whiff of negativity. We depend on the guarantee in our children's faces that we will not die. Children whose defining quality annihilates that fantasy of immortality are a particular insult; we must love them for themselves, and not for the best of ourselves in them, and that is a great deal harder to do. Loving our own children is an exercise for the imagination.
-- Andrew Solomon -
The most important thing to remember about depression is this: you do not get the time back. It is not tacked on at the end of your life to make up for the disaster years. Whatever time is eaten by a depression is gone forever. The minutes that are ticking by as you experience the illness are minutes you will not know again.
-- Andrew Solomon -
Some people are trapped by the belief that love comes in finite quantities, and that our kind of love exhausts the supply upon which they need to draw. I do not accept competitive models of love, only additive ones.
-- Andrew Solomon -
When I was younger, not being accepted made me enraged, but now, I am not inclined to dismantle my history. If you banish the dragons, you banish the heroes-and we become attached to the heroic strain in our personal history.
-- Andrew Solomon -
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Mild depression is a gradual and sometimes permanent thing that undermines people the way rust weakens iron ... Like physical pain that becomes chronic, it is miserable not so much because it is intolerable in the moment as because it is intolerable to have known it in the moments gone and to look forward only to knowing it in the moments to come.
-- Andrew Solomon -
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 -
A large proportion of my best friends are a little bit crazy. ... I try to be cautious with my friends who are too sane. Depression is itself destructive, and it breeds destructive impulses: I am easily disappointed in people who don't get it ...
-- Andrew Solomon -
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 -
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I met people on college campuses who were defining themselves as genderqueer to express revolutionary feelings, or to communicate their individuality; they were gender fluid without being gender dysphoric. This phenomenon may be culturally significant, but it has only a little bit in common with the people who feel they can have no authentic self in their birth gender.
-- Andrew Solomon -
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. We can recognize only a small fragment of our own, and an even smaller fragment of anyone else's, impetus.
-- Andrew Solomon -
Treating an identity as an illness invites real illness to make a braver stand.
-- Andrew Solomon -
That, in essence, is the catastrophe of suicide for those who survive: not only the loss of someone, but the loss of the chance to persuade that person to act differently, the loss of the chance to connect.
-- Andrew Solomon -
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We cannot bear a pointless torment, but we can endure great pain if we believe that it's purposeful.
-- Andrew Solomon -
Ease makes less of an impression on us than struggle.
-- Andrew Solomon -
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.
-- Andrew Solomon -
Parenthood abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger,
-- Andrew Solomon -
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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 hurt.
-- Andrew Solomon -
Loving our own children is an exercise for the imagination.
-- Andrew Solomon -
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.
-- Andrew Solomon -
We don't seek the painful experiences that hew our identities, but we seek our identities in the wake of painful experiences. We cannot bear a pointless torment, but we can endure great pain if we believe that it's purposeful. Ease makes less of an impression on us than struggle. We could have been ourselves without our delights, but not without the misfortunes that drive our search for meaning. 'Therefore, I take pleasure in infirmities,' St. Paul wrote in Second Corinthians, 'for when I am weak, then I am strong.'
-- Andrew Solomon -
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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 -
Labeling a child's mind as diseased-whether with autism, intellectual disabilities, or transgenderism-may reflect the discomfort that mind gives parents more than any discomfort it causes their child. Much gets corrected that might better have been left alone.
-- Andrew Solomon -
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.
-- Andrew Solomon -
Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance.
-- Andrew Solomon -
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