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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
Household
Damage
Grow
Loved
Grows
Felt
People

More quotes by Andrew Solomon

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There is no question that abuse, drugs and exposure to violence at home can exacerbate someone's criminal tendencies enormously. But there are many, many criminals who don't come from that background.
Andrew Solomon
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Every organization does good and bad things.
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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The campaign against polygamy, around which a lot of anti-Mormon sentiment was organized, seems horrific to me.
Andrew Solomon
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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.
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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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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One has to weigh all of one's values always in relative terms. On the upside, you get people who are not acting on their homosexual attraction, who are avoiding the sin of practicing homosexuality. On the downside, you have destroyed marriages, traumatized children, and dead people who have taken their own lives.
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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It is nearly impossible to hate anyone whose story you know.
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 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 look at the rates of suicide among gay teens. They are so, so high for suicide attempts and for completed suicides.
Andrew Solomon
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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.
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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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 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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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
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I'm not studying everything that can go wrong. What I'm studying is how much love there can be, even when everything appears to be going wrong.
Andrew Solomon
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In these xenophobic times, when politicians are stoking everyone's anxiety about threats from abroad, I would argue that engaging with the rest of the world is not only a luxury, in the way that travel is, but actually a moral responsibility.
Andrew Solomon