Andrew Solomon
I often say that the opposite of depression is not happiness but vitality.Collection: Happiness
Parenting involves two separate activities. You have to change your child in that you need to educate your child and instill moral values in them. But you also need to celebrate your child for who he or she is and make them feel really good.Collection: Parenting
Parenting is no sport for perfectionists.Collection: Parenting
I started traveling out of curiosity, but I have come to believe in travel's political importance, that encouraging a nation's citizenry to travel may be as important as encouraging school attendance, environmental conservation, or national thrift. You cannot understand the otherness of places you have not encountered.Collection: Environmental
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.Collection: Happiness
It is nearly impossible to hate anyone whose story you know.Collection: Inspirational
One of the things that often gets lost in discussions of depression is that you know it's ridiculous. You know it's ridiculous while you're experiencing it. You know that most people manage to listen to their messages, and eat lunch, and organise themselves to take a shower and go out the front door, and that it's not a big deal. And yet you are nonetheless in its grip and you are unable to figure out any way around it.Collection: Doors
You need to take the traumas and make them part of who you've come to be, and you need to fold the worst events of your life into a narrative of triumph, evincing a better self in response to things that hurt.Collection: Motivational
We cannot bear a pointless torment, but we can endure great pain if we believe that it's purposeful.Collection: Pain
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-and we become attached to the heroic strain in our personal history.Collection: Hero
I believe that words are strong, that they can overwhelm what we fear when fear seems more awful than life is good.Collection: Strong
Listen to the people who love you. Believe that they are worth living for even when you don't believe it. Seek out the memories depression takes away and project them into the future. Be brave; be strong; take your pills. Exercise because it's good for you even if every step weighs a thousand pounds. Eat when food itself disgusts you. Reason with yourself when you have lost your reason.Collection: Love
The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, and it was vitality that seemed to seep out of me.Collection: Opposites
Antonio Gramsci said that social reformers should have pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will. This means that one must have the intellectual ability to see how bad things are and the emotional ability to look forward with hope. It's a hard combination to sustain, but if you can do it, you can change the world.Collection: Mean
When you banish the dragons you banish the heroes.Collection: Hero
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.Collection: Believe
We don't seek the painful experiences that hew our identities, but we seek our identities in the wake of painful experiences.Collection: Painful Experiences
It is important not to suppress your feelings altogether when you are depressed. It is equally important to avoid terrible arguments or expressions of outrage. You should steer clear of emotionally damaging behavior. People forgive, but it is best not to stir things up to the point at which forgiveness is required. When you are depressed, you need the love of other people, and yet depression fosters actions that destroy that love. Depressed people often stick pins into their own life rafts. The conscious mind can intervene. One is not helpless.Collection: Depression
Life is enriched by difficulty; love is made more acute when it requires exertion.Collection: Love Is
I can see the beauty of glass objects fully at the moment when they slip from my handCollection: Hands
I found myself losing interest in almost everything, I didn't want to do any of the things I had previously wanted to do and I didn't know why. Everything there was to do seemed like too much work. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, and it was vitality that seemed to seep away from me in that moment.Collection: Opposites
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.Collection: Running
I think a lot of the time people assume that their values are universal. And they don't understand which aspects of their values are actually universal and which aspects are very specific.Collection: Thinking
A sense of humor is the best indicator that you will recover; it is often the best indicator that people will love you. Sustain that and you have hope.Collection: Love You
Mild depression is a gradual and sometimes permanent thing that undermines people the way rust weakens iron ... Like physical pain that becomes chronic, it is miserable not so much because it is intolerable in the moment as because it is intolerable to have known it in the moments gone and to look forward only to knowing it in the moments to come.Collection: Pain
Parenthood always involves recognizing your child as separate and different from you.Collection: Children
Some people are trapped by the belief that love comes in finite quantities, and that our kind of love exhausts the supply upon which they need to draw. I do not accept competitive models of love, only additive ones.Collection: People
The absence of words is the absence of intimacy. There are experiences that are starved for language.Collection: Language
A large proportion of my best friends are a little bit crazy. ... I try to be cautious with my friends who are too sane. Depression is itself destructive, and it breeds destructive impulses: I am easily disappointed in people who don't get it.Collection: Depression
Science still won't explain the mysterious nature of love and despair.Collection: Despair
The more gay people can tell our stories, the more other people will accept gay people.Collection: Gay
I have always believed in trying to be a good person and giving to the world, and treating others in a just, kind, merciful way.Collection: Giving
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.Collection: Ideas
I'm sure that if we had enough sophistication, someone could look at what my changes in brain structure were as I came to feel more deeply in love.Collection: Brain
Despair is part of love.Collection: Despair
People who believe that they are going to be excommunicated and shamed, or whatever other dark things may happen to them, are much less likely to enter open, loving relationships. And they are also much less likely to have the self-esteem that is required to be monogamous and loving. And in consequence, they are much less likely to create families.Collection: Self Esteem
The Church responds to antiquated social realities, and those realities remain much more current in Utah precisely because of the Church.Collection: Reality
The tragedies that are being brought about vastly outweigh the benefits that are being achieved.Collection: Tragedy
In these xenophobic times, when politicians are stoking everyone's anxiety about threats from abroad, I would argue that engaging with the rest of the world is not only a luxury, in the way that travel is, but actually a moral responsibility.Collection: Responsibility
I do think that if the Church can see its way to greater tolerance, Church members will have greater exposure to gay people, and the lives of those gay people will be better.Collection: Gay
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.Collection: Children
If you are married and you go off and have an affair with someone, if you are a husband who does that, it may potentially hurt your wife enormously. But it seems to me likely also to compromise your marriage. That seems to me to be a harm.Collection: Hurt
I don't believe that there is anyone of faith whose faith would not be strengthened by those experiences of family.Collection: Believe
I hope the Church will examine what is good and what is ill, and what good could be achieved by getting the suicidal, self-destructive, possibly carnal, or celibate to move toward this experience of love.Collection: Moving
There is a line that I always loved from Lucretius. He said, "The sublime is the art of exchanging easier for more difficult pleasures." The presumption of that formulation is that the more difficult pleasures are actually better than the easier pleasures. That is why one makes the exchange.Collection: Art
If I understand correctly, part of the objection to homosexuality used to have to do with the fact that gay people didn't reproduce. Part of it seems to have to do, as a lot of Christian resistance to gayness does, with a dim view of sex that is not procreative, and that is therefore lascivious.Collection: Christian
In coming to an appreciation of the Mormon Church, one of the things that has been most compelling to me is the Mormon understanding of family, which extends beyond the general injunction to be fruitful and multiply, and addresses the permanence of love relationships into eternity, and embraces the sanctity of having children.Collection: Appreciation
I really feel that the Church leaders have blood on their hands. I feel that there are gay Mormons who have committed suicide or whose lives have been destroyed because of the attitude of the Church.Collection: Suicide
I have two nexuses of sadness about the Mormon Church. The first is the effect the Church's position on homosexuality has on Mormons.Collection: Sadness
There is also somehow the idea that this gay thing is all just about indulgence in carnal pleasure. When I was twenty and felt that nobody could know I was gay, I was having sex with strangers in public parks. I don't think it was evil exactly, but it wasn't so great either. There was nobody particularly benefiting from it, except, I suppose, to the extent that it gave some pleasure to me and perhaps whomever I was with.Collection: Sex