Andrew Solomon

“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 bra...”

“Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair.”

“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 emot...”

“I believe that words are strong, that they can overwhelm what we fear when fear seems more awful than life is good.”

“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:...”

“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.”

“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...”

“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...”

“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...”

“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.”

“Oh yes, I certainly have low days. I feel that in treating the depression, it's not so much that I've become happier as it is that I can be unhappy in better ways.”

“My risk tolerance is higher than some people's, but it's not nearly as high as some people's. I don't want to exaggerate my bravado. I haven't been on the front lines. I haven't ever stepped...”

“Travel is an exercise partly in broadening yourself and partly in defining your own limits.”

“With the removal of questions about gayness and transgender status in the Census, we really stand to lose a lot of the progress that has been made, and certainly not to make further progress...”

“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 f...”

“Forging meaning is about changing yourself. Building identity is about changing the world.”

“The only way I seem to be able to keep going while I'm writing is to munch my way through boxes of chocolates.”

“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 a...”

“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...”

“Gay rights are not primarily marriage rights, and for the millions who live in unaccepting places with no resources, dignity remains elusive. I am lucky to have forged meaning and built iden...”