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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The Church responds to antiquated social realities, and those realities remain much more current in Utah precisely because of the Church.
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I had known a couple of people who had died, but the loss of my mother contained something of the profoundly unknowable.
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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.
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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.
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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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I spent years thinking I had to make a choice between being true to myself and being with a man and not having a family, and trying to live something of a lie and being with a woman and having children.
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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.
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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.
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Religion is so focused on family. These days, for many people, being gay is also focused on family.
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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.
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Treating an identity as an illness invites real illness to make a braver stand.
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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.
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We cannot bear a pointless torment, but we can endure great pain if we believe that it's purposeful.
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It's deeply humbling to realize that there is no such thing as a society with a purchase on truth.
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There is a great deal of sin that comes from homosexuals who believe their homosexuality is a sin.
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I'm sure that if we had enough sophistication, someone could look at what my changes in brain structure were as I came to feel more deeply in love.
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Life is enriched by difficulty love is made more acute when it requires exertion.
Andrew Solomon
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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.
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Parenthood abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger.
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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