Andrew Solomon Quotes

Hatred does not obliterate love. Indeed, the two are in constant fellowship.

I had thought that when you feel your worst your tears flood, but the very worst pain is the arid pain of total violation that comes after the tears are all used up, the pain that stops up every space...

I had to know the stories these women had to tell, she explained, because I wanted to understand very specifically what each one had to vanquish.

I love the sense of vast transformation that hangs on us at this new millennium, the feeling that we are at the brink of knowing more than people have ever known before.

I still remember the moment. I ordered a chicken salad and it tasted like chalk. I knew I was depressed. And I went downhill so fast. That’s when I really started drinking. I just did everything to fu...

I was walking down the street today, she said, and I thought, I am probably dying. And then I thought, should we have cherries or pears at lunch? And the two things felt too much the same.

I went to Cambodia to be humbled by the pain of others, and I was humbled down to the ground.

I wish I'd been accepted sooner and better. When I was younger, not being accepted made me enraged, but now, I am not inclined to dismantle my history. If you banish the dragons, you banish the heroes...

If something or someone doesn’t work, it’s in a state of grace, progress, and evolution. It will attract love and empathy. If it does work, it has merely completed its job and is probably dead.

If you stimulate seizures in an animal every day, the seizures eventually become automatic; the animal will go on having them once a day even if you withdraw the stimulation. In much the same way, the...

In typical circumstances, to have children who won't care for you in your dotage is to be King Lear. Disability changes the reciprocity equation.

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...

Most people don’t like one another’s unhappiness very much. Few can cope with the idea of depression divorced from external reality. Many would prefer to think that if you’re suffering, it’s with reas...

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 w...

Psychosis is a gross disturbance in an individual's ability to distinguish self from reality. For schizophrenics, the membrane between imagination and reality is so porous that having an idea and havi...

Since I am writing a book about depression, I am often asked in social situations to describe my own experiences, and I usually end by saying that I am on medication. Still? people ask. But you seem f...

So many people have asked me what to do for depressed friends and relatives, and my answer is actually simple: blunt their isolation. Do it with cups of tea or with long talks or by sitting in a room...

We are all differently abled from one another, and context—which is socially constructed—often decides what will be protected and indulged.

When the child does not conform to this image, the parents often need help in adapting their behavior to the reality—they

Woody Allen once quipped that dwarf is once of the four funniest words in the English language. To be in your very essence perceived as comical is a significant burden.