Quote

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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Andrew Solomon
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: October 30
Author
Clinical Psychologist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
Time
Experience
Eaten
Life
Ends
Depression
Remember
Illness
Back
Disaster
Important
Minutes
Thing
Forever
Years
Gone
Tacked
Make
Whatever
Ticking

More quotes by 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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The thing that makes me really outraged, is the idea that the Mormon Church would presume to get involved in decisions that have little to do with Mormonism.
Andrew Solomon
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The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, and it was vitality that seemed to seep out of me.
Andrew Solomon
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I'd had a vaguely Jewish upbringing, but no deep connection to faith.
Andrew Solomon
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The idea of what it is like to lose everything is awful.
Andrew Solomon
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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
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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.
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With children who have never said a word, parents tend to assume, for better or for worse, that there isn't any language there.
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If really good people who are deeply committed and who are thriving spiritually have to beat down the nature with which they seem to have been born and cut themselves off from the full realization of love, how can that be pleasing to God?
Andrew Solomon
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I look at the rates of suicide among gay teens. They are so, so high for suicide attempts and for completed suicides.
Andrew Solomon
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Being gay is immutable.
Andrew Solomon
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I don't believe that raising my voice in song is going to be pleasing to a God who is sitting upstairs somewhere, waiting to be pleased.
Andrew Solomon
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There is no question that abuse, drugs and exposure to violence at home can exacerbate someone's criminal tendencies enormously. But there are many, many criminals who don't come from that background.
Andrew Solomon
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In coming to an appreciation of the Mormon Church, one of the things that has been most compelling to me is the Mormon understanding of family, which extends beyond the general injunction to be fruitful and multiply, and addresses the permanence of love relationships into eternity, and embraces the sanctity of having children.
Andrew Solomon
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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
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I hate the comparative idea that you have to love your spouse more than you love your parents.
Andrew Solomon
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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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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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I had known a couple of people who had died, but the loss of my mother contained something of the profoundly unknowable.
Andrew Solomon
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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