Quotes from Andrew Solomon

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.

Someday, being gay will be a simple fact, free of party hats and blame. But not yet.

The worst mistake anyone can make is to perceive anyone else as lesser. The deeper you look into other souls - and writing is primarily an exercise in doing just that - the clearer people's inherent dignity becomes.

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.

Being in a marriage and having children is the greatest pleasure, but it is certainly not the easiest pleasure. It is not like eating ice cream.

The problem is that even as you reveal the mysteries in your past, you are accumulating them in the present; complete honesty is the stuff of post-mortem, not autobiography.

When you close down your borders, you're helping people build up a lot of hate toward you. That ungenerosity is not only not very attractive, from a moral and social standpoint, but also it's not very effective as a means of defending the country.

I've had a mental illness for nearly half my life, and I can no longer imagine myself without it. It seems less like something that happened to me than like part of who I am; some days, it is the thing about me, but it is always at least a thing about me.

I am not a great believer in the idea that journalistic neutrality means you have to abandon the people you talk to.

My father's an opera nut, and my stepmother used to work at the Metropolitan Opera, so I had a lot of opera immersion. I like the grandness and pretention of it.

When you believe that you cannot stitch your own heart back together, go to work on the hearts of other people; there is no surer way to repair yourself than to repair them.

I felt like all of the work was training for just one central idea: Accept your child for who he is. I'm not saying that I've done a brilliant job with that. But I've done my best.

There is enormous shame around depression of any kind and at any time. And there's enormous social stigma attached to it, which we need to go on fighting. But I think that the sense of depression during pregnancy and early motherhood has been particularly stigmatized, that people especially feel that should be the happiest time of your life.

Exercise because it's good for you even if every step weighs a thousand pounds.

Shutting out the depression strengthens it. While you hide from it, it grows.

Sleep is my great indulgence, and I get eight hours every night. Being chronically overtired raises stress levels in a bad way and is responsible for a lot of depressive breaks.

One of the things that frequently gets lost in descriptions of depression is that the depressed person often knows that it is a ludicrous condition to feel so disabled by the ordinary business of quotidian life.

I had always thought of myself as fairly tough and fairly strong and fairly able to cope with anything. And then I had a series of personal losses. My mother died. A relationship that I was in came to end, and a variety of other things went awry.

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.

I can see the beauty of glass objects fully at the moment when they slip from my hand

We think that fear must be played out in fight, with military intervention, or in flight, via isolationism - but we are not hunted game, and those are not the only options. There is also the possibility of acceptance, with its corollary of understanding and its ultimate manifestation in embracing.

As a little kid in the late 1960s, I was afraid of the world. Even if I didn't get caught in the draft that was sending American teenagers to Vietnam, there was always the possibility of a Soviet nuclear attack. I made constant escape plans and imagined a life going from port to port.

Just as Chairman Mao and Joseph Stalin started by going after the intellectuals, against those whose words who might form an opposition to them, so Trump has gone across us. Free speech is first among equals when we look at what is being violated by this new regime.

The experience of being depressed and emerging from depression made me understand the idea of a soul. I felt that the language in which one could best acknowledge that drew from faith.