Quote

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
Become
Accept
Best
Accepting
Self
Parents
Children
Question
Parent
Selves
Turns
Parenting
Help
Crucial
Helping
Extent

More quotes by 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.
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Every organization does good and bad things.
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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 the Mormon Church still supported polygamy, and if it appeared to be a system that was not exploitative of women, I wouldn't feel that it's my place to forbid it.
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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.
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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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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 believe very deeply that this beauty I call the soul is not a random occurrence. I don't know what its meaning is at some larger level, but I know that it has meaning.
Andrew Solomon
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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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It is nearly impossible to hate anyone whose story you know.
Andrew Solomon
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It seems particularly ironic that a church that at one stage, a long time ago, fought to redefine marriage should now be so opposed to these attempts to redefine marriage.
Andrew Solomon
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I can see the beauty of glass objects fully at the moment when they slip from my hand
Andrew Solomon
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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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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.
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I tend to find the ecstasy hidden in ordinary joys, because I did not expect those joys to be ordinary to me.
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A sense of humor is the best indicator that you will recover it is often the best indicator that people will love you. Sustain that and you have hope.
Andrew Solomon
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Science still won't explain the mysterious nature of love and despair.
Andrew Solomon
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Being gay is immutable. Maybe someday we'll figure out more of the science and it will be changeable, but we have no leads so far.
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.
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There is a great deal of sin that comes from homosexuals who believe their homosexuality is a sin.
Andrew Solomon