Andrew Solomon
There is a great deal of sin that comes from homosexuals who believe their homosexuality is a sin.Collection: Believe
Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance.Collection: Depression
People … don't want to be cured or changed or eliminated. They want to be whoever it is that they've come to be.Collection: People
Every organization does good and bad things.Collection: Organization
I just look at my own life, which is full of error as all life is. I have done plenty of things that I am not proud of.Collection: Errors
Parenthood abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger.Collection: Parenthood
If you don't want to have gay weddings in Mormon churches, that's fine. That's absolutely up to the members of the faith or the leadership of the faith. I would never suggest that the Mormon Church has to consecrate gay unions. But homosexuality runs at a fairly constant rate through all populations. There are many gay Mormons.Collection: Running
Religion is so focused on family. These days, for many people, being gay is also focused on family. The Mormon Church is especially focused on family, and I'd have hoped, therefore, that the Mormon Church would especially have celebrated how all of these people who might have been lonely and suicidal and childless are now able to lead this other life. I would have thought it would be a cause for immense celebration. Instead it has been, obviously, a cause of great concern to the Church and its leadership.Collection: Lonely
When a church manipulates the law to say, "These people are lesser," it takes a lot of resilience to hold your head up and say, "I am not lesser!" Some people can do it and some cannot; and some of those people who cannot will be destroyed.Collection: Law
I think what the Church should ideally do, and does appear to do in the context of straight relationships, is to support people in crossing from the easier pleasure of momentary carnal satisfaction, into the more difficult pleasure of love and family and relationship.Collection: Thinking
Any community that remains an abstraction is an easy target for prejudice and cruelty, but any community that becomes fully humanized is much harder to treat in that way.Collection: Community
I don't understand what the nature of God is. But I do have the feeling that I'm at some feet, and lucky to be there.Collection: Feet
Having always imagined myself in a fairly slim minority, I suddenly saw that I was in a vast company. Difference unites us. While each of these experiences can isolate those who are affected, together they compose an aggregate of millions whose struggles connect them profoundly. The exceptional is ubiquitous; to be entirely typical is the rare and lonely state.Collection: Lonely
That, in essence, is the catastrophe of suicide for those who survive: not only the loss of someone, but the loss of the chance to persuade that person to act differently, the loss of the chance to connect.Collection: Suicide
I have a very difficult time believing that there is some being who is going to invite me into heaven or not on the basis of whether I wear a yarmulke or whether I have been sprinkled with water while someone said something. Some of the ritual is very beautiful, but I find it difficult to believe that it really has to do with God. I believe that dogma comes from man.Collection: Beautiful
Being gay is immutable.Collection: Gay
The way that Russian Orthodox services work generally, and certainly the way that this worked, is that it goes on for hours and hours, and people wander in and wander out, and people talk the whole way through. One of the American women said to the other, "This is so beautiful. I can actually imagine maybe even becoming Orthodox." She went on and on, and finally a Russian seated just in front of her turned and said, "You are not member of church because it is beautiful; you are member of church because it is the single truth of God!"Collection: Beautiful
Then I repeated these words to my spirits: 'Leave me be; give me peace; and let me do the work of my life. I will never forget you.' Something about that incantation was particularly appealing to me. 'I will never forget you'-- as though one had to address the pride of the spirits, as though one wanted them to feel good about being exorcised.Collection: Pride
Identity itself should be not a smug label or a gold medal but a revolution.Collection: Gold
Kids with Down syndrome are, by and large, quite affectionate and relatively guileless, and frequently, the attachments to them grow and deepen. And the meaning that parents find in it grows and deepens.Collection: Kids
All parenting turns on a crucial question: to what extent parents should accept their children for who they are, and to what extent they should help them become their best selves.Collection: Children
We live in the right time, even if it doesn't always feel like it.Collection: Right Time
My parents deeply and truly loved each other, and if my mother hadn't died they would have been together forever. They were together for as much of forever as was given to them. They really loved my brother and me and were very good to us. It gave the model of how to have a happy marriage and family, but it also set the bar very high.Collection: Mother
I'm a huge believer in science. But I don't think it explains everything.Collection: Thinking
A lot of people are very political when they are young, and then they outgrow it.Collection: People
I found it very comforting to see that there is no such thing as a completely normal family. People find their way through whatever the differences may be.Collection: Differences
There is no question that abuse, drugs and exposure to violence at home can exacerbate someone's criminal tendencies enormously. But there are many, many criminals who don't come from that background.Collection: Home
I was in fact anxious about whether I would be any good at being a father. And then I met so many people who had been good parents under difficult circumstances, and I felt inspired by them.Collection: Father
The absence of marriages will result in all kinds of financial burdens that gay people wouldn't face if they could get married.Collection: Gay
I like the relative literacy of at least some of England. I mean, I didn't come for the food or the weather!Collection: Mean
I don't accept subtractive models of love, only additive ones. And I believe that in the same way we need species diversity to ensure that the planet can go on, so we need this diversity of affection and diversity of family in order to strengthen the ecosphere of kindness.Collection: Kindness
Your gender identity is who you are. Sexual identity is who you bounce that off of.Collection: Identity
The most important thing to remember about depression is this: you do not get the time back. It is not tacked on at the end of your life to make up for the disaster years. Whatever time is eaten by a depression is gone forever. The minutes that are ticking by as you experience the illness are minutes you will not know again.Collection: Years
Depression means that you have no point of view.Collection: Mean
Though many schizophrenics become curiously attached to their delusions, the fading of the nondelusional world puts them in loneliness beyond all reckoning, a fixed residence on a noxious private planet they can never leave, and where they can receive no visitors.Collection: Depression
Depressed people cannot lead a revolution because depressed people can barely manage to get out of bed and put on their shoes and socks.Collection: Shoes
Suicide is a crime of loneliness, and adulated people can be frighteningly alone. Intelligence does not help in these circumstances; brilliance is almost always profoundly isolating.Collection: Suicide
I think an awful lot of the diplomatic problems that exist in the world come from people assuming that their society is the one with a purchase on truth.Collection: Thinking
While people argue with one another about the specifics of Freud's work and blame him for the prejudices of his time, they overlook the fundamental truth of his writing, his grand humility: that we frequently do not know our own motivations in life and are prisoners to what we cannot understand. We can recognize only a small fragment of our own, and an even smaller fragment of anyone else's, impetus.Collection: Motivation
Exercise because it's good for you even if every step weighs a thousand pounds.Collection: Exercise
I was overpowered by being in the world, by other people and their lives I couldn’t lead, their jobs I couldn’t do - overpowered even by jobs I would never want or need to do.Collection: Jobs
I have found that the greatest stories of acceptance and love and the ugliest stories of hideous cruelty and abuse have equally been perpetrated in the name of Christian faith.Collection: Christian
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.Collection: Jobs
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.Collection: College
And I found out about the wonderful world of sign language. I suddenly realized: If we as a society recognize Jewish culture, gay culture and Latino culture, we must recognize that this is a coherent culture, too. I think deafness is a disability for social constructionist reasons.Collection: Gay
I went through elementary school being bullied and teased. I remember someone - I can't recall his name, but I can see his face - who decided on the school bus, when I was ten or eleven, to call me "Percy." That was somehow supposed to connect to the fact that I wasn't very athletic. I was, in fact, also not very coordinated. I was not very masculine, by the standards of ten-year-olds. I remember being on the school bus and everyone chanting, "Percy! Percy! Percy!" at me.Collection: School
I hate the comparative idea that you have to love your spouse more than you love your parents.Collection: Hate
I believe very deeply that this beauty I call the soul is not a random occurrence. I don't know what its meaning is at some larger level, but I know that it has meaning.Collection: Believe
I believe that organized religion is an ornament to the truth, and that aesthetics are part of its power.Collection: Believe