Andrew Solomon Quotes

47 Sourced Quotes

In the subconscious fantasies that make conception look so alluring, it is often ourselves that we would like to see live forever, not someone with a personality of his own.

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

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
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
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
I started this book to forgive my parents and ended it by becoming a parent. Understanding backward liberated me to live forward.

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

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
I think all love is one-third projection and one-third acceptance and never more than one-third knowledge and insight.

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

Andrew Solomon
"I'm not responsible for my child and who she's become, but I am responsible to her, and she is a wonderful person. I love her. I don't know if you need to know anything else, but that's all I need to know." —Carol

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
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
I espouse reproductive libertarianism, because when everyone has the broadest choice, love itself expands. The affection my family have found in one another is not a better love, but it is another love, and just as species diversity is crucial to sustain the planet, this diversity strengthens the ecosphere of kindness. The road less traveled by, as it turns out, leads to pretty much the same place.

Andrew Solomon
Insofar as our children resemble us, they are our most precious admirers, and insofar as they differ, they can be our most vehement distractors. From the beginning, we tempt them into imitation of us and long for what may be life's most profound compliment: their choosing to live according to our own system of values. Though many of us take pride in how different we are from our parents, we are endlessly sad at how different our children are from us.

Andrew Solomon