Quote

Penalizing homosexuals does not save any innocent victims. The idea that God and the Church accept these people while they are celibate and then if they go off and do something with someone else and both derive joy from it without any apparent harm to anyone else, the Church excommunicates them - that, to me, is bizarre.

Andrew Solomon

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Andrew Solomon
Age: 60
Born: 1963
Born: October 30
Author
Clinical Psychologist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
Someone
Save
Derive
Doe
Accept
Apparent
Ideas
Accepting
Homosexual
Without
Joy
Bizarre
Something
Anyone
Victims
People
Church
Innocent
Idea
Victim
Celibate
Else
Harm
Homosexuals

More quotes by Andrew Solomon

Image
I hated being depressed, but it was also in depression that I learned my own acreage, the full extent of my soul.
Andrew Solomon
Image
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
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
I'd had a vaguely Jewish upbringing, but no deep connection to faith.
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
It is nearly impossible to hate anyone whose story you know.
Andrew Solomon
Image
Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance.
Andrew Solomon
Image
I do think that if the Church can see its way to greater tolerance, Church members will have greater exposure to gay people, and the lives of those gay people will be better.
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
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.
Andrew Solomon
Image
I just look at my own life, which is full of error as all life is. I have done plenty of things that I am not proud of.
Andrew Solomon
Image
I believe that organized religion is an ornament to the truth, and that aesthetics are part of its power.
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
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
Image
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
Image
I found myself losing interest in almost everything, I didn't want to do any of the things I had previously wanted to do and I didn't know why. Everything there was to do seemed like too much work. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, and it was vitality that seemed to seep away from me in that moment.
Andrew Solomon
Image
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
Image
There is a tendency to dehumanize kids that commit crimes. The system is focused on punishment, not on rehabilitation. These kids are the most misunderstood and most cruelly treated.
Andrew Solomon
Image
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.
Andrew Solomon
Image
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