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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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Andrew Solomon
Age: 60
Born: 1963
Born: October 30
Author
Clinical Psychologist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
Damage
Grow
Loved
Grows
Felt
People
Household

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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.
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When a church manipulates the law to say, These people are lesser, it takes a lot of resilience to hold your head up and say, I am not lesser! Some people can do it and some cannot and some of those people who cannot will be destroyed.
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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.
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If your love didn't always contain the possibility of loss, it would be very different from human love as we know it.
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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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Science still won't explain the mysterious nature of love and despair.
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Then I repeated these words to my spirits: 'Leave me be give me peace and let me do the work of my life. I will never forget you.' Something about that incantation was particularly appealing to me. 'I will never forget you'-- as though one had to address the pride of the spirits, as though one wanted them to feel good about being exorcised.
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There is neither a cure for nor a way to repair autism. There is no implant like there is for the deaf.
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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.
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I understand why there would be prohibitions on straying from monogamy because of the harm that it does not only to the person who is betrayed, but also to the person who is betraying. Betray is a sort of shorthand for what happens.
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If you don't want to have gay weddings in Mormon churches, that's fine. That's absolutely up to the members of the faith or the leadership of the faith. I would never suggest that the Mormon Church has to consecrate gay unions. But homosexuality runs at a fairly constant rate through all populations. There are many gay Mormons.
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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.
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We live in the right time, even if it doesn't always feel like it.
Andrew Solomon
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I had known a couple of people who had died, but the loss of my mother contained something of the profoundly unknowable.
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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.
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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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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.
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The more gay people can tell our stories, the more other people will accept gay people.
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I know one gay ex-Mormon who is a talented, self-destructive alcoholic. Whenever he is drunk and going on a tear, we are back to the Mormon Church and his being thrown out of the Mormon Church and growing up with this sense of being evil.
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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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