Quotes from Andrew Solomon

The Internet, [Judy] Singer said, is a prosthetic device for people who can't socialize without it. For anyone challenged by language and social rules, a communication system that does not operate in real time is a godsend.

Fixing is the illness model; acceptance is the identity model; which way any family goes reflects their assumptions and resources.

Everything passes away—suffering, pain, blood, hunger, pestilence. The sword will pass away too, but the stars will still remain when the shadows of our presence and our deeds have vanished from the earth. There is no man who does not know that. Why, then, will we not turn our eyes toward the stars? Why?

Absence does not so much make the heart grow fonder as give the heart time to integrate what it has not previously absorbed, time to make sense of what happened too quickly to have any meaning in the instant. This is always true. If it is in absence that people forget each other, it is also in the quiet pause of absence that, minds running in symmetry, people come to know each other; there is sometimes as much intimacy in the span of continents as in the shared hours before dawn.

Grief is a humble angel who leaves you with strong, clear thoughts and a sense of your own depth. Depression is a demon who leaves you appalled.

Belonging is one of the things that makes life bearable, and it can be tough to look at a binary world and choose against both sides.

Treating an identity as an illness invites real illness to make a braver stand.

Other illnesses, from alcoholism to heart disease, mask depression when it causes them; if one takes that into consideration, depression may be the biggest killer on earth.

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.

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 through which you once metered the world, or the world, you. This is the presence of major depression.

She looked at me – I was crying, though she was not – and she took on a tone of gentle reprimand. 'Don't think you're paying me some kind of tribute if you let my death become the great event of your life,' she said to me. 'The best tribute you can pay to me as a mother is to go on and have a good and fulfilling life. Enjoy what you have.

I met people on college campuses who were defining themselves as genderqueer to express revolutionary feelings, or to communicate their individuality; they were gender fluid without being gender dysphoric. This phenomenon may be culturally significant, but it has only a little bit in common with the people who feel they can have no authentic self in their birth gender.

The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, and my life, as I write this, is vital.

Love is circumstantial; we can love anyone if need be; and losing the one we love is the singular catastrophe. Time does not heal it. Every present moment yearns for even the roughest past.

There is no essential self that lies pure as a vein of gold under the chaos of experience and chemistry. Anything can be changed, and we must understand the human organism as a sequence of selves that succumb to or choose one another.

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 brain that has gone into depression a few times will continue to return to depression over and over. This suggests that depression, even if it is occasioned by external tragedy, ultimately changes the structure, as well as the biochemistry, of the brain.

It is the aloneness within us made manifest, and it destroys not only connection to others but also the ability to be peacefully alone with oneself.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and no power is more absolute than parenthood.

I hate the loss of diversity in the world, even though I sometimes get a little worn out by being that diversity.

Anxietatea este, aÈ™adar, suferinÈ›a din cauza a ceea ce se va întâmpla, iar melancolia e suferinÈ›a din cauza a ceea ce s-a întâmplat.

I realized that I had demanded that my parents accept me but had resisted accepting them.

It is too often the quality of happiness that you feel at every moment its fragility, while depression seems when you are in it to be a state that will never pass.

Love, no matter what.

Labeling a child's mind as diseased—whether with autism, intellectual disabilities, or transgenderism—may reflect the discomfort that mind gives parents more than any discomfort it causes their child. Much gets corrected that might better have been left alone.