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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Andrew Solomon

Image
You need to take the traumas and make them part of who you've come to be, and you need to fold the worst events of your life into a narrative of triumph, evincing a better self in response to things that hurt.
Andrew Solomon
Image
Labeling a child's mind as diseased-whether with autism, intellectual disabilities, or transgenderism-may reflect the discomfort that mind gives parents more than any discomfort it causes their child. Much gets corrected that might better have been left alone.
Andrew Solomon
Image
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
Image
A lot of people are very political when they are young, and then they outgrow it.
Andrew Solomon
Image
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
Image
The tragedies that are being brought about vastly outweigh the benefits that are being achieved.
Andrew Solomon
Image
Being gay is immutable. Maybe someday we'll figure out more of the science and it will be changeable, but we have no leads so far.
Andrew Solomon
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I think you can't deny that because the cochlear implant exists, the signing world is shrinking.
Andrew Solomon
Image
The more gay people can tell our stories, the more other people will accept gay people.
Andrew Solomon
Image
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
Image
We cannot bear a pointless torment, but we can endure great pain if we believe that it's purposeful.
Andrew Solomon
Image
Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair.
Andrew Solomon
Image
Though many schizophrenics become curiously attached to their delusions, the fading of the nondelusional world puts them in loneliness beyond all reckoning, a fixed residence on a noxious private planet they can never leave, and where they can receive no visitors.
Andrew Solomon
Image
I hated being depressed, but it was also in depression that I learned my own acreage, the full extent of my soul.
Andrew Solomon
Image
Suicide is a crime of loneliness, and adulated people can be frighteningly alone. Intelligence does not help in these circumstances brilliance is almost always profoundly isolating.
Andrew Solomon
Image
Exercise because it's good for you even if every step weighs a thousand pounds.
Andrew Solomon
Image
Your gender identity is who you are. Sexual identity is who you bounce that off of.
Andrew Solomon
Image
Science still won't explain the mysterious nature of love and despair.
Andrew Solomon