Quote

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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Andrew Solomon
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: October 30
Author
Clinical Psychologist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
Accepted
Inclined
Hero
Dragons
Personal
Attached
History
Strain
Become
Conformity
Made
Heroic
Enraged
Heroes
Dismantle
Younger
Banish

More quotes by 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.
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Depressed people cannot lead a revolution because depressed people can barely manage to get out of bed and put on their shoes and socks.
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Exercise because it's good for you even if every step weighs a thousand pounds.
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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
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Your gender identity is who you are. Sexual identity is who you bounce that off of.
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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
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We live in the right time, even if it doesn't always feel like it.
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There is neither a cure for nor a way to repair autism. There is no implant like there is for the deaf.
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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.
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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.
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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
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The campaign against polygamy, around which a lot of anti-Mormon sentiment was organized, seems horrific to me.
Andrew Solomon
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The absence of words is the absence of intimacy. There are experiences that are starved for language.
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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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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.
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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
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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
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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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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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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