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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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Andrew Solomon
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: October 30
Author
Clinical Psychologist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
Helping
Extent
Become
Accept
Best
Accepting
Self
Parents
Children
Question
Parent
Selves
Turns
Parenting
Help
Crucial

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Being gay is immutable.
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I love to communicate, and I love music. That's why I always thought not being able to hear would be a tragedy.
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Treating an identity as an illness invites real illness to make a braver stand.
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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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I don't believe that there is anyone of faith whose faith would not be strengthened by those experiences of family.
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I was in fact anxious about whether I would be any good at being a father. And then I met so many people who had been good parents under difficult circumstances, and I felt inspired by them.
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When you banish the dragons you banish the heroes.
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I grew up feeling that to be gay was a tragedy. I didn't grow up thinking that it was morally wrong, but I grew up thinking that it would make me marginal, prevent me from having children, and quite possibly prevent me from having a meaningful long relationship. It seemed that this condition would leave me with a vastly reduced life.
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I think what the Church should ideally do, and does appear to do in the context of straight relationships, is to support people in crossing from the easier pleasure of momentary carnal satisfaction, into the more difficult pleasure of love and family and relationship.
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The idea of anyone contemplating our family and witnessing the affection that we all have for one another and seeing evil in it is deeply hurtful and sad and also deeply bewildering.
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Science still won't explain the mysterious nature of love and despair.
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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.
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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.
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I have found that the greatest stories of acceptance and love and the ugliest stories of hideous cruelty and abuse have equally been perpetrated in the name of Christian faith.
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I have always believed in trying to be a good person and giving to the world, and treating others in a just, kind, merciful way.
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Ease makes less of an impression on us than struggle.
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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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I believe that words are strong, that they can overwhelm what we fear when fear seems more awful than life is good.
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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.
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