Quote

I did grow up in a household in which I felt that to be myself was to damage the people I loved.

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
Grows
Felt
People
Household
Damage
Grow
Loved

More quotes by Andrew Solomon

Image
Treating an identity as an illness invites real illness to make a braver stand.
Andrew Solomon
Image
I encounter a lot of prejudice and a lot of darkness. I have to negotiate constantly through situations that are uncomfortable or difficult or strange.
Andrew Solomon
Image
Some autistic people may emerge from their condition, but nobody knows when and why.
Andrew Solomon
Image
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
Image
The absence of words is the absence of intimacy. There are experiences that are starved for language.
Andrew Solomon
Image
One of the things that frequently gets lost in descriptions of depression is that the depressed person often knows that it is a ludicrous condition to feel so disabled by the ordinary business of quotidian life.
Andrew Solomon
Image
The campaign against polygamy, around which a lot of anti-Mormon sentiment was organized, seems horrific to me.
Andrew Solomon
Image
With children who have never said a word, parents tend to assume, for better or for worse, that there isn't any language there.
Andrew Solomon
Image
Our needs are our greatest asset. It turns out I've learned to give all the things that I need.
Andrew Solomon
Image
A large proportion of my best friends are a little bit crazy. ... I try to be cautious with my friends who are too sane. Depression is itself destructive, and it breeds destructive impulses: I am easily disappointed in people who don't get it.
Andrew Solomon
Image
Fixing is the illness model acceptance is the identity model which way any family goes reflects their assumptions and resources.
Andrew Solomon
Image
I have found that the greatest stories of acceptance and love and the ugliest stories of hideous cruelty and abuse have equally been perpetrated in the name of Christian faith.
Andrew Solomon
Image
I'm a huge believer in science. But I don't think it explains everything.
Andrew Solomon
Image
I don't believe that there is anyone of faith whose faith would not be strengthened by those experiences of family.
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
I had known a couple of people who had died, but the loss of my mother contained something of the profoundly unknowable.
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
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.
Andrew Solomon
Image
Living with depression is like trying to keep your balance while you dance with a goat -- it is perfectly sane to prefer a partner with a better sense of balance.
Andrew Solomon
Image
We don't seek the painful experiences that hew our identities, but we seek our identities in the wake of painful experiences.
Andrew Solomon