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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.

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
Identities
Wake
Experiences
Painful
Seek
Identity

More quotes by Andrew Solomon

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Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance. It is tumbleweed distress that thrives on thin air, growing despite its detachment from the nourishing earth. It can be described only in metaphor and allegory
Andrew Solomon
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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.
Andrew Solomon
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I found myself losing interest in almost everything, I didn't want to do any of the things I had previously wanted to do and I didn't know why. Everything there was to do seemed like too much work. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, and it was vitality that seemed to seep away from me in that moment.
Andrew Solomon
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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.
Andrew Solomon
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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.
Andrew Solomon
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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.
Andrew Solomon
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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.
Andrew Solomon
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When you believe that you cannot stitch your own heart back together, go to work on the hearts of other people there is no surer way to repair yourself than to repair them.
Andrew Solomon
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I found it very comforting to see that there is no such thing as a completely normal family. People find their way through whatever the differences may be.
Andrew Solomon
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My parents deeply and truly loved each other, and if my mother hadn't died they would have been together forever. They were together for as much of forever as was given to them. They really loved my brother and me and were very good to us. It gave the model of how to have a happy marriage and family, but it also set the bar very high.
Andrew Solomon
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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.
Andrew Solomon
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I think an awful lot of the diplomatic problems that exist in the world come from people assuming that their society is the one with a purchase on truth.
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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There is neither a cure for nor a way to repair autism. There is no implant like there is for the deaf.
Andrew Solomon
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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.
Andrew Solomon
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I like the relative literacy of at least some of England. I mean, I didn't come for the food or the weather!
Andrew Solomon
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The more gay people can tell our stories, the more other people will accept gay people.
Andrew Solomon
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Depressed people cannot lead a revolution because depressed people can barely manage to get out of bed and put on their shoes and socks.
Andrew Solomon
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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.
Andrew Solomon
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I have spent a lot of my life trying to do good and be a humanitarian, to write about difficult places, and to tell the story of oppressed peoples.
Andrew Solomon