Quote

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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Andrew Solomon
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: October 30
Author
Clinical Psychologist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
Thing
Anticipation
Love
Engines
Flaws
Intimacy
Depression
Despair
Specter
Loss
Flaw
Without
Engine

More quotes by 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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I just look at my own life, which is full of error as all life is. I have done plenty of things that I am not proud of.
Andrew Solomon
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Oppression breeds the power to oppose it.
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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Listen to the people who love you. Believe that they are worth living for even when you don't believe it.
Andrew Solomon
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I really feel that the Church leaders have blood on their hands. I feel that there are gay Mormons who have committed suicide or whose lives have been destroyed because of the attitude of the Church.
Andrew Solomon
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The Church responds to antiquated social realities, and those realities remain much more current in Utah precisely because of the Church.
Andrew Solomon
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I'd had a vaguely Jewish upbringing, but no deep connection to faith.
Andrew Solomon
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It is easy to keep secrets by being honest in an ironic tone of voice.
Andrew Solomon
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Life is enriched by difficulty love is made more acute when it requires exertion.
Andrew Solomon
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There is a false moral imperative that seems to be all-around us that treatment of depression, the medications and so on, are an artifice, and that it's not natural. And I think that's very misguided. It would be natural for people's teeth to fall out, but there is nobody militating against toothpaste, at least not in my circles.
Andrew Solomon
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The campaign against polygamy, around which a lot of anti-Mormon sentiment was organized, seems horrific to me.
Andrew Solomon
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Mild depression is a gradual and sometimes permanent thing that undermines people the way rust weakens iron ... Like physical pain that becomes chronic, it is miserable not so much because it is intolerable in the moment as because it is intolerable to have known it in the moments gone and to look forward only to knowing it in the moments to come.
Andrew Solomon
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The strengthening of faith, I think, is the ultimate goal of organized religion altogether.
Andrew Solomon
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If really good people who are deeply committed and who are thriving spiritually have to beat down the nature with which they seem to have been born and cut themselves off from the full realization of love, how can that be pleasing to God?
Andrew Solomon
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The most important thing to remember about depression is this: you do not get the time back. It is not tacked on at the end of your life to make up for the disaster years. Whatever time is eaten by a depression is gone forever. The minutes that are ticking by as you experience the illness are minutes you will not know again.
Andrew Solomon
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There is a tendency to dehumanize kids that commit crimes. The system is focused on punishment, not on rehabilitation. These kids are the most misunderstood and most cruelly treated.
Andrew Solomon
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If some glorious angel suddenly descended through my living room ceiling and offered to take away the children I have and give me other, better children — more polite, funnier, nicer, smarter — I would cling to the children I have and pray away that atrocious spectacle.
Andrew Solomon
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The thing that makes me really outraged, is the idea that the Mormon Church would presume to get involved in decisions that have little to do with Mormonism.
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