Quotes from Andrew Solomon

Further, the devices being implanted now are different from the ones used even a decade ago. This means that all decisions about how early to implant children are based on speculation rather than experience.

Since the invention of TV, the average night's sleep has gone down by two hours.

In the twentieth century, homosexuality was said to be caused by overbearing mothers and passive fathers; schizophrenia reflected the parents' unconscious wish that their child did not exist; and autism was the result of "refrigerator mothers," whose coldness doomed their children to a fortress of silence. We've now realized that such complex and overdetermined conditions are not the result of parental attitude or behavior.

Some kinds of grace would not have entered the world if everyone's hips and legs worked the same way. Deformity has been brought into beauty's fold, a catalyst for justice rather than an affront to it.

Disabled people are protected by fragile laws, and if they are judged to have an identity rather than an illness, they may forfeit those safeguards.

Problemele lor sunt cu adev?rat grave ?i, chiar dac? nu pricepem de ce, trebuie s? accept?m gravitatea acestei chestiuni.

The social perception of whether any supposed deficit is the parents' fault is always a critical factor in the experience of both children and parents. The attribution of responsibility to parents is often a function of ignorance, but it also reflects our anxious belief that we control our own destinies.

There is no such thing as reproduction, only acts of production.

A veces me pregunto cómo se las arreglan todos aquellos que no escriben, componen o pintan para liberarse de la locura, la melancolía y el miedo al pánico inherente a la condición humana».

At least half of the children available for adoption in the United States have disabilities of some kind.

People with disabilities make up the largest minority in America; they constitute 15 percent of the population though only 15 percent of those were born with their disability and about a third are over sixty-five…

I hate the loss of diversity in the world, even though I sometimes get tired of embodying that diversity. I don't wish for anyone in particular to be gay, but the idea of no one being gay makes me miss myself already.

It's clear that identity is a finite concept. What's not clear is the location of its boundaries.

the fibrous tongue is actually the strongest muscle per inch in the body; if it were the size of a biceps, you could pick up a car with it.

Some people can bear a great deal of pain and still experience great happiness, while others are made unrelentingly miserable by less acute pain.

So the question is whether people prefer to be marginal in a mainstream world, or mainstream in a marginal world, and many people quite understandably prefer the latter.

Many coping strategies have a Zen simplicity. Instead of resolving chaos, find beauty and happiness amid chaos. I am reminded of a friend who said that when she found out her husband couldn't fill her needs, she changed her needs;

The artists found out long ago that the way to combat a government that presents lies as if they were the truth is to tell the truth as if it were a joke. Humor became a means of encoded communication, and so long as they made jokes they could be vocal and invulnerable.

There is no question that modern life carries burdens incompatible with the brains we have evolved. Depression may, then, well be a consequence of our doing what we did not evolve to do.

There is a Russian expression: if you wake up feeling no pain, you know you're dead.

It is not suffering that is precious, but the concentric pearlescence with which we contain it. The raw grit of anguish will never be in short supply. There is enough of it in the happiest life to serve these instructive purposes, and there always will be. We are more sympathetic to Holocaust survivors than to malcontent children of privilege, but we all have our darkness, and the trick is making something exalted of it.

The difficulty of learning spoken English for a person profoundly deaf from an early age has been likened to a hearing American trying to learn spoken Japanese while locked within a soundproof glass cubicle.

Depression lowers self-esteem, but in many personalities, it does not eliminate pride, which is as good an engine for the fight as any I know. When you're so far down that love seems almost meaningless, vanity and a sense of obligation can save your life.

Pot fi, într-o relaÈ›ie imperfect?, mult mai bine decât când sunt singur?.