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We cannot bear a pointless torment, but we can endure great pain if we believe that it's purposeful.

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
Cannot
Great
Purposeful
Believe
Pointless
Torment
Endure
Bear
Bears
Pain

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I felt like all of the work was training for just one central idea: Accept your child for who he is. I'm not saying that I've done a brilliant job with that. But I've done my best.
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I understand why there would be prohibitions on straying from monogamy because of the harm that it does not only to the person who is betrayed, but also to the person who is betraying. Betray is a sort of shorthand for what happens.
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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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When you banish the dragons you banish the heroes.
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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 did grow up in a household in which I felt that to be myself was to damage the people I loved.
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Identity itself should be not a smug label or a gold medal but a revolution.
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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.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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If your love didn't always contain the possibility of loss, it would be very different from human love as we know it.
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I think it's up to the parents to determine whether what they're doing is consigning their child to difficulty. It's not as though they were crippling their children after they were born.
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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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I hate the comparative idea that you have to love your spouse more than you love your parents.
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People who believe that they are going to be excommunicated and shamed, or whatever other dark things may happen to them, are much less likely to enter open, loving relationships. And they are also much less likely to have the self-esteem that is required to be monogamous and loving. And in consequence, they are much less likely to create families.
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