Quote

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.

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
Faith
Profoundly
Evil
Implies
Born
Characteristic
Anything
Characteristics
Even
Possibly
People
Kindness
Compassion
Stance
Told
Toxic

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I was overpowered by being in the world, by other people and their lives I couldn’t lead, their jobs I couldn’t do - overpowered even by jobs I would never want or need to do.
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Identity itself should be not a smug label or a gold medal but a revolution.
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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.
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The idea of what it is like to lose everything is awful.
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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
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Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance. It is tumbleweed distress that thrives on thin air, growing despite its detachment from the nourishing earth. It can be described only in metaphor and allegory
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It's deeply humbling to realize that there is no such thing as a society with a purchase on truth.
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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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There is a false moral imperative that seems to be all-around us that treatment of depression, the medications and so on, are an artifice, and that it's not natural. And I think that's very misguided. It would be natural for people's teeth to fall out, but there is nobody militating against toothpaste, at least not in my circles.
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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.
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Being gay is immutable. Maybe someday we'll figure out more of the science and it will be changeable, but we have no leads so far.
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I'm a huge believer in science. But I don't think it explains everything.
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Antonin Artaud wrote on one of his drawings, Never real and always true, and that is how depression feels. You know that it is not real, that you are someone else, and yet you know that it is absolutely true.
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It is nearly impossible to hate anyone whose story you know.
Andrew Solomon
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Parenthood abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger.
Andrew Solomon
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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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Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance.
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.
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Oppression breeds the power to oppose it.
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In coming to an appreciation of the Mormon Church, one of the things that has been most compelling to me is the Mormon understanding of family, which extends beyond the general injunction to be fruitful and multiply, and addresses the permanence of love relationships into eternity, and embraces the sanctity of having children.
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