Quotes from Andrew Solomon

Having anticipated the onward march of our selfish genes, many of us are unprepared for children who present unfamiliar needs. Parenthood abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger, and the more alien the stranger, the stronger the whiff of negativity.

I understood that going where I would actually be foreign might distract people from the more intimate nature of my defining otherness.

Disability scholars Andrienne Asch and Erik Parens, in their seminal discussion of the problem, wrote,'Pre-natal diagnosis reinforces the medical model that disability itself, not societal discrimination against people with disabilities, is the problem to be solved.

You can exorcise the demons of schizophrenics who perceive that there's something foreign inside them. But it's much harder with depressed people because we believe we are seeing the truth. But the truth lies.

If real experience has triggered your descent into depression, you have a human yen to understand it even when you have ceased to experience it; the limited of experience that is achieved with chemical pills is not tantamount to a cure.

No one has ever suggested legal protections for ugly people to make up for the misaligned features that will compromise their personal and professional lives. For people disabled by inherent moral perplexity, we offer not support but imprisonment.

It is the sincere horror of it that gets others motivated, so say Watson and Andrews; the dysfunction caused by the onset of depression may serve a useful function in that it is "a device for the elicitation of altruism.

I was fascinated to hear of the suicide of an octopus, trained for the circus, that had been accustomed to do tricks for rewards of food. When the circus disbanded, the octopus was kept in a tank and no one paid any attention to his tricks. He gradually lost his color (octopuses' states of mind are expressed in their shifting hues) and finally went through his tricks a last time, failed to be rewarded, and used his beak to stab himself so badly that he died.

Biology is not destiny. There are ways to lead a good life with depression. Indeed, people who learn from their depression can develop a particular moral profundity from the experience

There is a basic emotional spectrum from which we cannot and should not escape, and I believe that depression is in that spectrum, located near not only grief but also love. Indeed I believe that all the strong emotions

If some glorious angel descended into my living room and offered to exchange my children for other, better children-brighter, kinder, funnier, more loving, more disciplined, more accomplished-I would clutch the ones I have and, like most parents, pray away the atrocious specter.

The monolithic problem of depression cannot be expressed with a monolithic response; depressions are contextual and must be interpreted within the contexts in which they occur.

A vida é repleta de tristezas: pouco importa o que fazemos, no final todos vamos morrer; cada um de nós está preso à solidão de um corpo independente; o tempo passa e o que passou nunca voltará. A dor é a nossa primeira experiência de desamparo no mundo, e ela nunca nos deixa.

are based on the principle that naming something is a good way to subdue it, and that knowing the source of a problem is useful in solving that problem.

All that children can properly require of their parents is that they tolerate their own muddled spectrum - that they neither insist on the lie of perfect happiness nor lapse into the slipshod brutality of giving up.

I hate the loss of diversity in the world, even though I sometimes get a little worn out by being that diversity. I don't wish for anyone in particular to be gay

There is no life that does not have the material for despair in it

Realitatea faptului c? trebuia s? îmi pun nu una, ci DOUÄ' È™osete, È™i apoi DOI pantofi m? copleÈ™ea, È™i voiam s? m? întorc în pat.

Cleaving to our own lives, with all their challenges and limitations and particularities, is vital.

em unless you got the money to pay." Fred has been given a regimen of meds for HIV, but he stopped

No one had forewarned me, however, that if you live abroad any good while, the notion of home is permanently compromised.

We like categories and clubs as much as we ever have, it's only that the ones we thought were inviolable turn out not to be, and others that we never imagined are taking their place.

A witness can be of more value than a policy analyst. An amateur witness, free of conceptual bias, sometimes sees the plainest truth. One should never be blinded by tailoring.

A crushed hope is suffused with a nobility that mere hopelessness can never know.