Andrew Solomon
27 quotes
Biography
Andrew Solomon is an American writer on politics, culture and psychology, who lives in New York City and London. He has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, Travel and Leisure, and other publications on a range of subjects, including depression, Soviet artists, the cultural rebirth of Afghanistan, Libyan politics, and Deaf politics.
"Listen to the people who love you. Believe that they are worth living for even when you don't believe it. Seek out the memories depression takes away and project them into the future. Be brave; be strong; take your pills. Exercise because it's good for you even if every step weighs a thousand pounds. Eat when food itself disgusts you. Reason with yourself when you have lost your reason."
"I believe that words are strong, that they can overwhelm what we fear when fear seems more awful than life is good."
"Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair."
"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."
"In the subconscious fantasies that make conception look so alluring, it is often ourselves that we would like to see live forever, not someone with a personality of his own."
"We depend on the guarantee in our children's faces that we will not die. Children whose defining quality annihilates that fantasy of immortality are a particular insult; we must love them for themselves, and not for the best of ourselves in them, and that is a great deal harder to do. Loving our own children is an exercise for the imagination."
"Insofar as our children resemble us, they are our most precious admirers, and insofar as they differ, they can be our most vehement distractors. From the beginning, we tempt them into imitation of us and long for what may be life's most profound compliment: their choosing to live according to our own system of values. Though many of us take pride in how different we are from our parents, we are endlessly sad at how different our children are from us."
"Insofar as I have written a self-help book, it is a how-to manual for receptivity: a description of how to tolerate what cannot be cured, and an argument that cures are not always appropriate even when they are feasible."
"Love is circumstantial we can love anyone if need be and losing the one we love is the singular catastrophe. Time does not heal it. Every present moment yearns for even the roughest past."
"If you banish the dragons, you banish the heroes..."
"It's a strange poverty of the English language, and indeed, of many other languages, that we use this same word, "depression" to describe how a kid feels when it rains on his birthday, and to describe how somebody feels the minute before they commit suicide."
"Despite every advancement, language remains the defining nexus of our humanity; it is where our knowledge and hope lie. It is the precondition of human tenderness, mightier than the sword but also infinitely more subtle and ultimately more urgent."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Travel is an exercise partly in broadening yourself and partly in defining your own limits."
"I started traveling out of curiosity, but I have come to believe in travel's political importance, that encouraging a nation's citizenry to travel may be as important as encouraging school attendance, environmental conservation, or national thrift. You cannot understand the otherness of places you have not encountered."
"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."
"Life is most transfixing when you are awake to diversity, not only of ethnicity, ability, gender, belief, and sexuality but also of age and experience. The worst mistake anyone can make is to perceive anyone else as lesser."
"Remember that writing things down makes them real; that it is nearly impossible to hate anyone whose story you know; and, most of all, that even in our post-postmodern era, writing has a moral purpose. With twenty-six shapes arranged in varying patterns, we can tell every story known to mankind, and make up all the new ones—indeed, we can do so in most of the world’s known tongues. If you can give language to experiences previously starved for it, you can make the world a better place."
"As you ripen, you’ll notice that time is the weirdest thing in the world, that these surprises are relentless, and that getting older is not a stroll but an ambush."
"Parenting is no sport for perfectionists."
"You don't think in depression that you've put on a gray veil and are seeing the world through the haze of a bad mood. You think that the veil has been taken away, the veil of happiness, and that now you're seeing truly."
"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."