Words matter. These are the best Andrew Solomon Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Depression is so exhausting – it takes up so much of your time and energy – and silence about it, it really does make the depression worse.
My father’s an opera nut, and my stepmother used to work at the Metropolitan Opera, so I had a lot of opera immersion. I like the grandness and pretention of it.
I often say that the opposite of depression is not happiness but vitality.
Most people imagine that resolving particular problems will make them happy. If only one had more money, or love, or success, then life would feel manageable. It can be devastating to realize the falseness of such tempered optimism.
The only way I seem to be able to keep going while I’m writing is to munch my way through boxes of chocolates.
I would have had an easier life if I were straight, but I would not be me. And I now like being myself better than the idea of being someone else, someone who, to be honest, I have neither the option of being nor the ability fully to imagine.
The worst mistake anyone can make is to perceive anyone else as lesser. The deeper you look into other souls – and writing is primarily an exercise in doing just that – the clearer people’s inherent dignity becomes.
When I was growing up, I kept hoping that I wasn’t really gay because I wanted to have children. I went through a long, tortured period, so the fact that I have been able to be true to myself and have a family has been the nicest surprise of my adulthood.
Dealing with depression effectively is a mark not of weakness, but of strength.
A great hope gets crushed every time someone reminds us that happiness can be neither assumed nor earned; that we are all prisoners of our own flawed brains; that the ultimate aloneness in each of us is, finally, inviolable.
Kids with Down syndrome are, by and large, quite affectionate and relatively guileless, and frequently, the attachments to them grow and deepen. And the meaning that parents find in it grows and deepens.
The anxiety phase of my first depression lasted six months. It was incredibly paralyzing.
Travel is an exercise partly in broadening yourself and partly in defining your own limits.
I was kind of a scaredy-cat as a kid, and I made a very deliberate decision at some point that I was not going to let fear rule my life or determine my experience. That wasn’t so easily accomplished.
Parenting is no sport for perfectionists.
I think that people are most comfortable when the world is orderly. I think there’s the sense that when you begin questioning basic distinctions, such as the distinction between being male and being female, it represents a threat to the social order.
Every stage of life longs for others. When one is young and eager, one aspires to maturity, and everyone older would like nothing better than to be young.
Forging meaning is about changing yourself. Building identity is about changing the world.
Oh yes, I certainly have low days. I feel that in treating the depression, it’s not so much that I’ve become happier as it is that I can be unhappy in better ways.
No one much wants to be belittled, but we tolerate slurs surprisingly often for ourselves; for our lionised children, we demand freedom from insult.
Parenting involves two separate activities. You have to change your child in that you need to educate your child and instill moral values in them. But you also need to celebrate your child for who he or she is and make them feel really good.
I’m attached to my children with whatever flaws they have, and if some glorious angel broke through the living room ceiling and offered to exchange them for other, better children, I’d cling to my kids and pray away this specter.
I loathe having a fragile brain and knowing as I make any plan that I should provide for the possibility that my mind may betray me at short notice.
Britain’s withdrawal from the E.U., like Donald Trump’s proposal to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, is based on a false belief in self-reliance.
Never forget that the truest luxury is imagination, and that being a writer gives you the leeway to exploit all of the imagination’s curious intricacies, to be what you were, what you are, what you will be, and what everyone else is or was or will be, too.
Now, it’s not that I think that being gay is the most amazing, wonderful thing in the world, but I have a husband; I have a life; I have friends who I’ve met through this. It’s who I am.
My risk tolerance is higher than some people’s, but it’s not nearly as high as some people’s. I don’t want to exaggerate my bravado. I haven’t been on the front lines. I haven’t ever stepped on a land mine.
When you close down your borders, you’re helping people build up a lot of hate toward you. That ungenerosity is not only not very attractive, from a moral and social standpoint, but also it’s not very effective as a means of defending the country.
The problem is that even as you reveal the mysteries in your past, you are accumulating them in the present; complete honesty is the stuff of post-mortem, not autobiography.
We can never afford to be complacent; there is no such thing as security when it comes to human rights.
As a little kid in the late 1960s, I was afraid of the world. Even if I didn’t get caught in the draft that was sending American teenagers to Vietnam, there was always the possibility of a Soviet nuclear attack. I made constant escape plans and imagined a life going from port to port.
When I was born, the wisdom was that homosexuality was an illness; that it was caused largely by somebody’s mother, and a distorted relationship with the mother. And now, as I live my life – married to a husband, with kids – it’s an identity.
Fortunately for me, my mother loved travel. Our first non-beach family trip abroad – to England, France, and Switzerland – came when I was 11, and thereafter, we often tagged along on my father’s European business trips.
