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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

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Andrew Solomon
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: October 30
Author
Clinical Psychologist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
Truth
Problem
Purchase
Come
Diplomatic
Think
Assuming
Thinking
Awful
World
Exist
People
Problems
Society

More quotes by 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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I think it's up to the parents to determine whether what they're doing is consigning their child to difficulty. It's not as though they were crippling their children after they were born.
Andrew Solomon
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I have spent a lot of my life trying to do good and be a humanitarian, to write about difficult places, and to tell the story of oppressed peoples.
Andrew Solomon
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The tragedies that are being brought about vastly outweigh the benefits that are being achieved.
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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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 is nearly impossible to hate anyone whose story you know.
Andrew Solomon
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One of the things that frequently gets lost in descriptions of depression is that the depressed person often knows that it is a ludicrous condition to feel so disabled by the ordinary business of quotidian life.
Andrew Solomon
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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
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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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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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We live in the right time, even if it doesn't always feel like it.
Andrew Solomon
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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.
Andrew Solomon
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Depression means that you have no point of view.
Andrew Solomon
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When you banish the dragons you banish the heroes.
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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People who believe that they are going to be excommunicated and shamed, or whatever other dark things may happen to them, are much less likely to enter open, loving relationships. And they are also much less likely to have the self-esteem that is required to be monogamous and loving. And in consequence, they are much less likely to create families.
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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The absence of words is the absence of intimacy. There are experiences that are starved for language.
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