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I had always thought of myself as fairly tough and fairly strong and fairly able to cope with anything. And then I had a series of personal losses. My mother died. A relationship that I was in came to end, and a variety of other things went awry.

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
Strong
Series
Mother
Died
Ends
Tough
Thought
Loss
Awry
Anything
Personal
Cope
Relationship
Losses
Able
Went
Fairly
Always
Came
Variety
Things

More quotes by Andrew Solomon

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Despair is part of love.
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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.
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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.
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If someone says: I don't want to have a cochlear implant, because I want my child to grow up with a rich sense of deaf culture, he must acknowledge that the deaf culture that exists in the world today has a different scale than the deaf culture that's likely to exist in the world 50 years from now.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I had always wanted to have children, so it caused me a lot of grief when I was younger, and I had supposed that gay people could not be parents.
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Religion is so focused on family. These days, for many people, being gay is also focused on family.
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When I was younger, not being accepted made me enraged, but now, I am not inclined to dismantle my history. If you banish the dragons, you banish the heroes-and we become attached to the heroic strain in our personal history.
Andrew Solomon
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Science still won't explain the mysterious nature of love and despair.
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It is nearly impossible to hate anyone whose story you know.
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
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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.
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Our needs are our greatest asset. It turns out I've learned to give all the things that I need.
Andrew Solomon
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Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance.
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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I believe that words are strong, that they can overwhelm what we fear when fear seems more awful than life is good.
Andrew Solomon
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Antonio Gramsci said that social reformers should have pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will. This means that one must have the intellectual ability to see how bad things are and the emotional ability to look forward with hope. It's a hard combination to sustain, but if you can do it, you can change the world.
Andrew Solomon