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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: 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

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Oppression breeds the power to oppose it.
Andrew Solomon
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I don't believe that raising my voice in song is going to be pleasing to a God who is sitting upstairs somewhere, waiting to be pleased.
Andrew Solomon
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I think a lot of the time people assume that their values are universal. And they don't understand which aspects of their values are actually universal and which aspects are very specific.
Andrew Solomon
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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.
Andrew Solomon
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Parenthood always involves recognizing your child as separate and different from you.
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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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I had known a couple of people who had died, but the loss of my mother contained something of the profoundly unknowable.
Andrew Solomon
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We cannot bear a pointless torment, but we can endure great pain if we believe that it's purposeful.
Andrew Solomon
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I'm a huge believer in science. But I don't think it explains everything.
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.
Andrew Solomon
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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.
Andrew Solomon
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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
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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.
Andrew Solomon
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I would certainly not want my child to be schizophrenic. I wouldn't want him or her to be a criminal either. If, on the other hand, I had a deaf child, it would help that I have developed a real admiration for Deaf culture.
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.
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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Listen to the people who love you. Believe that they are worth living for even when you don't believe it.
Andrew Solomon
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And I found out about the wonderful world of sign language. I suddenly realized: If we as a society recognize Jewish culture, gay culture and Latino culture, we must recognize that this is a coherent culture, too. I think deafness is a disability for social constructionist reasons.
Andrew Solomon
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The world changed, and the idea of having a family became feasible for homosexuals. But I was still left with the question as to what it would be like for a child to grow up with gay parents.
Andrew Solomon
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It's deeply humbling to realize that there is no such thing as a society with a purchase on truth.
Andrew Solomon