Quotes from Andrew Solomon

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.

I'm endlessly intrigued by stories, and I love helping someone to formulate his or her story. I can drift off when I'm reading pure abstraction, but the narratives of human lives hold my attention every time.

Nowadays, people often ask me when I came out, generalising from the experience of many young people who announce themselves to the world on a particular afternoon. But I did not divorce my reticence in a single sharp break. Rather, I seeped out like a spreading wine stain.

I chose fat and functional over slender and miserable.

Then I repeated these words to my spirits: 'Leave me be; give me peace; and let me do the work of my life. I will never forget you.' Something about that incantation was particularly appealing to me. 'I will never forget you'-- as though one had to address the pride of the spirits, as though one wanted them to feel good about being exorcised.

My goal is to stay safely in between self-analysis and self-destruction.

All parenting turns on a crucial question: to what extent parents should accept their children for who they are, and to what extent they should help them become their best selves.

There is so much pain in the world, and most of these people keep theirs secret, rolling through agonizing lives in invisible wheelchairs, dressed in invisible bodycasts.

Life is enriched by difficulty; love is made more acute when it requires exertion.

That, in essence, is the catastrophe of suicide for those who survive: not only the loss of someone, but the loss of the chance to persuade that person to act differently, the loss of the chance to connect.

Having always imagined myself in a fairly slim minority, I suddenly saw that I was in a vast company. Difference unites us. While each of these experiences can isolate those who are affected, together they compose an aggregate of millions whose struggles connect them profoundly. The exceptional is ubiquitous; to be entirely typical is the rare and lonely state.

Perhaps the immutable error of parenthood is that we give our children what we wanted, whether they want it or not. We heal our wounds with the love we wish we'd received, but are often blind to the wounds we inflict.

Those who believe their suffering has been valuable love more readily than those who see no meaning in their pain. Suffering does not necessarily imply love, but love implies suffering

The things that save you are as frequently trivial as monumental.

You lose the ability to trust anyone, to be touched, to grieve. Eventually, you are simply absent from yourself.

It is not true that love is not love which alters when it alteration finds. Love alters all the time; it is fluid, in perceptual flux, an evolving business across a lifetime.

There is no contradiction between loving someone and feeling burdened by that person; indeed, love tends to magnify the burden.

Parenthood abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger, and the more alien the stranger, the stronger the whiff of negativity. 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.

There is no life that does not have the material for despair in it, but some people go too close to the edge and others manage to stay sometimes sad in a safe clearing far from the cliffs. Once you cross over, the rules all change.

It is a surprise to me to like myself; among all the elaborate possibilities I contemplated for my future, that never figured. My hard-won contentment reflects the simple truth that inner peace often hinges on outer peace. In the gnostic gospel of St. Thomas, Jesus says, "If you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you.

If we tolerate prejudice toward any group, we tolerate it toward all groups," he said. "I couldn't have relationships that were conditional on excluding my brother—or anyone else. We are all in one fight, and our freedom is all the same freedom.

I told her that what was most important to me was not whether she loved a man or a woman, but that she loved and was loved well—that she experience passion, and the wonderful surprise of finding that someone feels about you as strongly as you do about them, lucky and full-hearted.

The worst of depression lies in a present moment that cannot escape the past it idealizes or deplores.

Rebuilding of the self in and after depression requires love, insight, work, and, most of all, time.