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Loving our own children is an exercise for the imagination.

Andrew Solomon

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Andrew Solomon
Age: 60
Born: 1963
Born: October 30
Author
Clinical Psychologist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
Loving
Exercise
Imagination
Children

More quotes by 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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At the end of the day, will God be interested primarily in whether I have been kind and helped others, or in whether I was baptized and how?
Andrew Solomon
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I have always believed in trying to be a good person and giving to the world, and treating others in a just, kind, merciful way.
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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There is a line that I always loved from Lucretius. He said, The sublime is the art of exchanging easier for more difficult pleasures. The presumption of that formulation is that the more difficult pleasures are actually better than the easier pleasures. That is why one makes the exchange.
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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In coming to an appreciation of the Mormon Church, one of the things that has been most compelling to me is the Mormon understanding of family, which extends beyond the general injunction to be fruitful and multiply, and addresses the permanence of love relationships into eternity, and embraces the sanctity of having children.
Andrew Solomon
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If I understand correctly, part of the objection to homosexuality used to have to do with the fact that gay people didn't reproduce. Part of it seems to have to do, as a lot of Christian resistance to gayness does, with a dim view of sex that is not procreative, and that is therefore lascivious.
Andrew Solomon
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I look at the rates of suicide among gay teens. They are so, so high for suicide attempts and for completed suicides.
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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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The absence of marriages will result in all kinds of financial burdens that gay people wouldn't face if they could get married.
Andrew Solomon
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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
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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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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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Ease makes less of an impression on us than struggle.
Andrew Solomon
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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.
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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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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I hated being depressed, but it was also in depression that I learned my own acreage, the full extent of my soul.
Andrew Solomon
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I think what the Church should ideally do, and does appear to do in the context of straight relationships, is to support people in crossing from the easier pleasure of momentary carnal satisfaction, into the more difficult pleasure of love and family and relationship.
Andrew Solomon