Quote

Identity itself should be not a smug label or a gold medal but a revolution.

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
Smug
Medal
Label
Labels
Identity
Gold
Revolution

More quotes by 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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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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Being in a marriage and having children is the greatest pleasure, but it is certainly not the easiest pleasure. It is not like eating ice cream.
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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Some people are trapped by the belief that love comes in finite quantities, and that our kind of love exhausts the supply upon which they need to draw. I do not accept competitive models of love, only additive ones.
Andrew Solomon
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One has to weigh all of one's values always in relative terms. On the upside, you get people who are not acting on their homosexual attraction, who are avoiding the sin of practicing homosexuality. On the downside, you have destroyed marriages, traumatized children, and dead people who have taken their own lives.
Andrew Solomon
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I spent years thinking I had to make a choice between being true to myself and being with a man and not having a family, and trying to live something of a lie and being with a woman and having children.
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
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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.
Andrew Solomon
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I'm not studying everything that can go wrong. What I'm studying is how much love there can be, even when everything appears to be going wrong.
Andrew Solomon
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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.
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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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.
Andrew Solomon
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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.
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 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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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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The absence of words is the absence of intimacy. There are experiences that are starved for language.
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 can see the beauty of glass objects fully at the moment when they slip from my hand
Andrew Solomon