Andrew Solomon QUOTES

81 " 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. "

― Andrew Solomon , The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

82 " 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. "

― Andrew Solomon , The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

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

― Andrew Solomon , Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

84 " 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. "

― Andrew Solomon , Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

85 " 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. "

― Andrew Solomon , The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

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

― Andrew Solomon , Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

87 " What to say? That I would have loved to make the trip but was busy staying out of the mental hospital? It’s so humiliating—so degrading. If I knew I wouldn’t get caught, I’d love to lie about it—invent an acceptable cancer, that recurs and vanishes, that people could understand—that wouldn’t make them frightened and uncomfortable. "

― Andrew Solomon , The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

88 " that I would give up my life readily if I found myself in war, or if my plane crashed into a desert. I would struggle tooth and nail to survive. It’s as though my life and I, having sat in opposition to each other, hating each other, wanting to escape each other, have now bonded forever and at the hip. The opposite of depression is not happiness but vitality, and my life, as I write this, is vital, even when sad. I may wake up sometime next year without my mind again; it is not likely to stick around all the time. Meanwhile, however, I have discovered what I would have to call a soul, a part of myself I could never have imagined until one day, seven years ago, when hell came to pay me a surprise visit. It’s a precious discovery. Almost every day I feel momentary flashes of hopelessness and wonder every time whether I am slipping. For a petrifying instant here and there, a lightning-quick flash, I want a car to run me over and I have to grit my teeth to stay on the sidewalk until the light turns green; or I imagine how easily I might cut my wrists; or I taste hungrily the metal tip of a gun in my mouth; or I picture going to sleep and never waking up again. I hate those feelings, but I know that they have driven me to look deeper at life, to find and cling to reasons for living. I cannot find it in me to regret entirely the course my life has taken. Every day, I choose, sometimes gamely and sometimes against the moment’s reason, to be alive. Is that not a rare joy? "

― Andrew Solomon , The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

89 " 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. "

― Andrew Solomon , Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

90 " 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. "

― Andrew Solomon , The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

91 " Parents’ early responses to and interactions with a child determine how that child comes to view himself. These parents are also profoundly changed by their experiences. If you have a child with a disability, you are forever the parent of a disabled child; it is one of the primary facts about you, fundamental to the way other people perceive and decipher you. Such parents tend to view aberrance as illness until habituation and love enable them to cope with their odd new reality—often by introducing the language of identity. Intimacy with difference fosters its accommodation. "

― Andrew Solomon , Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

92 " 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. "

― Andrew Solomon , The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

93 " If everyone has the capacity for some measure of depression under some circumstances, everyone also has the capacity to fight depression to some degree under some circumstances. Often, the fight takes the form of seeking out the treatments that will be most effective in the battle. It involves finding help while you are still strong enough to do so. It involves making the most of the life you have between your most severe episodes. Some horrendously symptom-ridden people are able to achieve real success in life; and some people are utterly destroyed by the mildest forms of the illness. "

― Andrew Solomon , The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

94 " In depression, the meaninglessness of every enterprise and every emotion, the meaninglessness of life itself, becomes self-evident. The only feeling left in this loveless state is insignificance. Life "

― Andrew Solomon , The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

95 " 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. "

― Andrew Solomon , Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

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

― Andrew Solomon , The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

97 " That is, perhaps, the greatest revelation I have had: not that depression is compelling but that the people who suffer from it may become compelling because of it. "

― Andrew Solomon , The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

98 " one loves and is loved in great pain, and one is alive in the experience of it. It is the walking-death quality of depression that I have tried to eliminate from my life; "

― Andrew Solomon , The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

99 " I’ll tell them all the good things and some difficulties. The parents may never accept what happened to them and yet accept their child. They’re two separate things, the parental loss, and the actual person they will almost always end up loving. "

― Andrew Solomon , Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

100 " This thought runs like a bright golden thread through the dark tapestry of our sorrow. We learn so much from our children—in patience, in humility, in gratitude for other blessings we had accepted before as a matter of course; so much in tolerance; so much in faith—believing and trusting where we cannot see; so much in compassion for our fellow man; and yes, even so much in wisdom about the eternal values in life. "

― Andrew Solomon , Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity