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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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Andrew Solomon
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: October 30
Author
Clinical Psychologist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
Seep
Vitality
Depression
Opposite
Opposites
Seemed
Happiness
Moments

More quotes by Andrew Solomon

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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.
Andrew Solomon
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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.
Andrew Solomon
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Loving our own children is an exercise for the imagination.
Andrew Solomon
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Exercise because it's good for you even if every step weighs a thousand pounds.
Andrew Solomon
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People … don't want to be cured or changed or eliminated. They want to be whoever it is that they've come to be.
Andrew Solomon
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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.
Andrew Solomon
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Being gay is immutable.
Andrew Solomon
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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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When a church manipulates the law to say, These people are lesser, it takes a lot of resilience to hold your head up and say, I am not lesser! Some people can do it and some cannot and some of those people who cannot will be destroyed.
Andrew Solomon
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I think a lot of the time people assume that their values are universal. And they don't understand which aspects of their values are actually universal and which aspects are very specific.
Andrew Solomon
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Our needs are our greatest asset. It turns out I've learned to give all the things that I need.
Andrew Solomon
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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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The experience of being depressed and emerging from depression made me understand the idea of a soul. I felt that the language in which one could best acknowledge that drew from faith.
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.
Andrew Solomon
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When you banish the dragons you banish the heroes.
Andrew Solomon
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If you don't want to have gay weddings in Mormon churches, that's fine. That's absolutely up to the members of the faith or the leadership of the faith. I would never suggest that the Mormon Church has to consecrate gay unions. But homosexuality runs at a fairly constant rate through all populations. There are many gay Mormons.
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.
Andrew Solomon
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The idea of what it is like to lose everything is awful.
Andrew Solomon
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Parenthood abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger.
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