110+ Andrew Solomon Quotes (Empathetic, Insightful And Profound)

Andrew Solomon is a writer, lecturer, and activist. He is the author of the National Book Award-winning book Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity. He is also the author of The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, which won the 2001 National Book Award for Nonfiction.

Top 10 Andrew Solomon Quotes

1. Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance.
2. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, and it was vitality that seemed to seep out of me.
3. I can see the beauty of glass objects fully at the moment when they slip from my hand
4. We don't seek the painful experiences that hew our identities, but we seek our identities in the wake of painful experiences.
5. 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.
6. 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?
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. 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 Short Quotes

• Exercise because it's good for you even if every step weighs a thousand pounds.
• 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.
• Your gender identity is who you are. Sexual identity is who you bounce that off of.
• I hate the comparative idea that you have to love your spouse more than you love your parents.
• The tragedies that are being brought about vastly outweigh the benefits that are being achieved.
• I'm a huge believer in science. But I don't think it explains everything.
• The idea of what it is like to lose everything is awful.
• Science still won't explain the mysterious nature of love and despair.
• Every organization does good and bad things.

Andrew Solomon Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

Antonio Gramsci said that social reformers should have pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will. This means that one must have the intellectual ability to see how bad things are and the emotional ability to look forward with hope. It's a hard combination to sustain, but if you can do it, you can change the world. — 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

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 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

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

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

There is a false moral imperative that seems to be all-around us that treatment of depression, the medications and so on, are an artifice, and that it's not natural. And I think that's very misguided. It would be natural for people's teeth to fall out, but there is nobody militating against toothpaste, at least not in my circles. — Andrew Solomon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think morality is more important than ever before. As we gain more power, the question of what we do with it becomes more and more crucial, and we are very close to really having divine powers of creation and destruction. The future of the entire ecological system and the future of the whole of life is really now in our hands. And what to do with it is an ethical question and also a scientific question. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

Ease makes less of an impression on us than struggle. — Andrew Solomon

Penalizing homosexuals does not save any innocent victims. The idea that God and the Church accept these people while they are celibate; and then if they go off and do something with someone else and both derive joy from it without any apparent harm to anyone else, the Church excommunicates them - that, to me, is bizarre. — 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

People who believe that they are going to be excommunicated and shamed, or whatever other dark things may happen to them, are much less likely to enter open, loving relationships. And they are also much less likely to have the self-esteem that is required to be monogamous and loving. And in consequence, they are much less likely to create families. — Andrew Solomon

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

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

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

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. — Andrew Solomon

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

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

There is also somehow the idea that this gay thing is all just about indulgence in carnal pleasure. When I was twenty and felt that nobody could know I was gay, I was having sex with strangers in public parks. I don't think it was evil exactly, but it wasn't so great either. There was nobody particularly benefiting from it, except, I suppose, to the extent that it gave some pleasure to me and perhaps whomever I was with. — Andrew Solomon

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

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. — Andrew Solomon

There is a line that I always loved from Lucretius. He said, "The sublime is the art of exchanging easier for more difficult pleasures." The presumption of that formulation is that the more difficult pleasures are actually better than the easier pleasures. That is why one makes the exchange. — Andrew Solomon

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

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. — Andrew Solomon

Being gay is immutable. — Andrew Solomon

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

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

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

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

Religion is so focused on family. These days, for many people, being gay is also focused on family. — Andrew Solomon

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

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

If you don't want to have gay weddings in Mormon churches, that's fine. That's absolutely up to the members of the faith or the leadership of the faith. I would never suggest that the Mormon Church has to consecrate gay unions. But homosexuality runs at a fairly constant rate through all populations. There are many gay Mormons. — Andrew Solomon

If I understand correctly, part of the objection to homosexuality used to have to do with the fact that gay people didn't reproduce. Part of it seems to have to do, as a lot of Christian resistance to gayness does, with a dim view of sex that is not procreative, and that is therefore lascivious. — Andrew Solomon

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

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

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

I have a very difficult time believing that there is some being who is going to invite me into heaven or not on the basis of whether I wear a yarmulke or whether I have been sprinkled with water while someone said something. Some of the ritual is very beautiful, but I find it difficult to believe that it really has to do with God. I believe that dogma comes from man. — Andrew Solomon

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

It does seem to me, though, that there is a difference between the Mormon Church saying, "We don't accept gay people within the Church; we don't accept gay marriage within the Church; we don't accept people who act on their homosexual desires within the Church;" and trying to interfere with what happens outside of the Church. That seemed to me to be an abomination. — Andrew Solomon

My parents deeply and truly loved each other, and if my mother hadn't died they would have been together forever. They were together for as much of forever as was given to them. They really loved my brother and me and were very good to us. It gave the model of how to have a happy marriage and family, but it also set the bar very high. — Andrew Solomon

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

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

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

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

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

Loving our own children is an exercise for the imagination. — Andrew Solomon

I've chronicled the experience of the mother of a transgender child who got attacked by the Ku Klux Klan in Tennessee, and that of a transgender woman who was asked to deliver a sermon at her Montana church and got a standing ovation from her congregation. The idea that Christianity is a blanket term that encompasses both of those attitudes seems ludicrous to me. — Andrew Solomon

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

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

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

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

I grew up feeling that to be gay was a tragedy. I didn't grow up thinking that it was morally wrong, but I grew up thinking that it would make me marginal, prevent me from having children, and quite possibly prevent me from having a meaningful long relationship. It seemed that this condition would leave me with a vastly reduced life. — Andrew Solomon

I look at the rates of suicide among gay teens. They are so, so high for suicide attempts and for completed suicides. — Andrew Solomon

The more gay people can tell our stories, the more other people will accept gay people. — Andrew Solomon

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

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

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

I really feel that the Church leaders have blood on their hands. I feel that there are gay Mormons who have committed suicide or whose lives have been destroyed because of the attitude of the Church. — Andrew Solomon

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

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

I got into my first serious relationship with a man when I was twenty-three. I had, before that, sort of a typical, sad history of relatively promiscuous sexual encounters with men I didn't know, because I felt that if I were involved with people I did know, other people would know that I was gay, and it was something that I needed to keep so secret. — Andrew Solomon

When I remember how unhappy I was in adolescence - about the fact that, though I wasn't really using the term to or for myself, I knew that I was gay - I think, "Oh, if someone then could have shown me just an hour in the life that I have now, I would have made it through all of that misery and despair just fine." The pain lay in thinking that I had a desolate future. — Andrew Solomon

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

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

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

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

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. — Andrew Solomon

If someone says: "I don't want to have a cochlear implant, because I want my child to grow up with a rich sense of deaf culture," he must acknowledge that the deaf culture that exists in the world today has a different scale than the deaf culture that's likely to exist in the world 50 years from now. — Andrew Solomon

Life Lessons by Andrew Solomon

1. Andrew Solomon emphasizes the importance of resilience and self-acceptance, teaching us that we should embrace our differences and strive to be our best selves despite life's struggles.
2. He encourages us to be open-minded and to strive for understanding and compassion for those who are different from us, reminding us that we all have our own unique struggles and that we should strive to be kind and understanding of one another.
3. He also encourages us to be brave and to take risks, teaching us that embracing our fears and facing them head-on can lead to great personal growth and success.