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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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Andrew Solomon
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: October 30
Author
Clinical Psychologist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
People
Aspect
Universal
Values
Actually
Understand
Aspects
Time
Assume
Think
Specific
Thinking
Assuming

More quotes by Andrew Solomon

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The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, and it was vitality that seemed to seep out of me.
Andrew Solomon
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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
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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
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If you are married and you go off and have an affair with someone, if you are a husband who does that, it may potentially hurt your wife enormously. But it seems to me likely also to compromise your marriage. That seems to me to be a harm.
Andrew Solomon
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At the end of the day, will God be interested primarily in whether I have been kind and helped others, or in whether I was baptized and how?
Andrew Solomon
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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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Parenthood abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger.
Andrew Solomon
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The Church responds to antiquated social realities, and those realities remain much more current in Utah precisely because of the Church.
Andrew Solomon
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I hated being depressed, but it was also in depression that I learned my own acreage, the full extent of my soul.
Andrew Solomon
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Your gender identity is who you are. Sexual identity is who you bounce that off of.
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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The idea of anyone contemplating our family and witnessing the affection that we all have for one another and seeing evil in it is deeply hurtful and sad and also deeply bewildering.
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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Depressed people cannot lead a revolution because depressed people can barely manage to get out of bed and put on their shoes and socks.
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.
Andrew Solomon
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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
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It is easy to keep secrets by being honest in an ironic tone of voice.
Andrew Solomon
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Mild depression is a gradual and sometimes permanent thing that undermines people the way rust weakens iron ... Like physical pain that becomes chronic, it is miserable not so much because it is intolerable in the moment as because it is intolerable to have known it in the moments gone and to look forward only to knowing it in the moments to come.
Andrew Solomon
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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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I think an awful lot of the diplomatic problems that exist in the world come from people assuming that their society is the one with a purchase on truth.
Andrew Solomon