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

Andrew Solomon

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Andrew Solomon
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: October 30
Author
Clinical Psychologist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
Proportion
Grief
Circumstances
Bereavement
Circumstance
Depression

More quotes by Andrew Solomon

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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
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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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In these xenophobic times, when politicians are stoking everyone's anxiety about threats from abroad, I would argue that engaging with the rest of the world is not only a luxury, in the way that travel is, but actually a moral responsibility.
Andrew Solomon
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The idea of what it is like to lose everything is awful.
Andrew Solomon
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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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I did grow up in a household in which I felt that to be myself was to damage the people I loved.
Andrew Solomon
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One has to weigh all of one's values always in relative terms. On the upside, you get people who are not acting on their homosexual attraction, who are avoiding the sin of practicing homosexuality. On the downside, you have destroyed marriages, traumatized children, and dead people who have taken their own lives.
Andrew Solomon
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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.
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
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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
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Your gender identity is who you are. Sexual identity is who you bounce that off of.
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
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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.
Andrew Solomon
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Loving our own children is an exercise for the imagination.
Andrew Solomon
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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
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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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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
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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
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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
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Identity itself should be not a smug label or a gold medal but a revolution.
Andrew Solomon