{"author":"Andrew Solomon","author_id":"Andrew+Solomon","total_quotes":45,"quotes":[{"text":"Parenting is no sport for perfectionists.","author":"Andrew Solomon","tags":["sport","perfectionists "],"id":1902,"author_id":"Andrew+Solomon"},{"text":"You are constantly told in depression that your judgment is compromised, but a part of depression is that it touches cognition. That you are having a breakdown does not mean that your life isn't a mess. If there are issues you have successfully skirted or avoided for years, they come cropping back up and stare you full in the face, and one aspect of depression is a deep knowledge that the comforting doctors who assure you that your judgment is bad are wrong. You are in touch with the real terribleness of your life. You can accept rationally that later, after the medication sets in, you will be better able to deal with the terribleness, but you will not be free of it. When you are depressed, the past and future are absorbed entirely by the present moment, as in the world of a three-year-old. You cannot remember a time when you felt better, at least not clearly; and you certainly cannot imagine a future time when you will feel better.","author":"Andrew Solomon","tags":["breakdown","cognition","depression","future","issues","judgment","present","troubles"],"id":2333,"author_id":"Andrew+Solomon"},{"text":"It's a strange poverty of the English language, and indeed, of many other languages, that we use this same word, 'depression' to describe how a kid feels when it rains on his birthday, and to describe how somebody feels the minute before they commit suicide.","author":"Andrew Solomon","tags":["depresssion","language"],"id":2743,"author_id":"Andrew+Solomon"},{"text":"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.","author":"Andrew Solomon","tags":["freud","humility","impetus","motivations","prejudice","truth","understanding"],"id":18038,"author_id":"Andrew+Solomon"},{"text":"I did not want to sit on the roof, though I was also aware that if I didn’t allow myself the relief of considering suicide, I would soon explode from within and commit suicide. I felt the fatal tentacles of this despair wrapping themselves around my arms and legs. Soon they would hold the fingers I would need to take the right pills or to pull the trigger, and when I had died, they would be the only motion left. I knew that the voice of reason (“For heaven’s sake, just go downstairs!”) was the voice of reason, but I also knew that by reason I would deny all the poison within me, and I felt already some strange despairing ecstasy at the thought of the end. If only I had been disposable like yesterday’s paper! I would have thrown myself away so quietly then and been glad of the absence, glad in the grave if that was the only place that could allow some gladness.","author":"Andrew Solomon","tags":["depression"],"id":26344,"author_id":"Andrew+Solomon"},{"text":"Despite every advancement, language remains the defining nexus of our humanity; it is where our knowledge and hope lie. It is the precondition of human tenderness, mightier than the sword but also infinitely more subtle and ultimately more urgent.","author":"Andrew Solomon","tags":["language"],"id":29475,"author_id":"Andrew+Solomon"},{"text":"It is not true that 'love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.' Love alters all the time; it is fluid, in perceptual flux, an evolving business across a lifetime.","author":"Andrew Solomon","tags":["love","parenthood"],"id":62949,"author_id":"Andrew+Solomon"},{"text":"There is a moment, if you trip or slip, before your hand shoots out to break your fall, when you feel the earth rushing up at you and you cannot help yourself, a passing, fraction-of-a-second terror. I felt that way hour after hour after hour. Being anxious at this extreme level is bizarre. You feel all the time that you want to do something, that there is some affect that is unavailable to you, that there’s a physical need of impossible urgency and discomfort for which there is no relief, as though you were constantly vomiting from your stomach but had no mouth.","author":"Andrew Solomon","tags":["anxiety","depression"],"id":79623,"author_id":"Andrew+Solomon"},{"text":"A great hope gets crushed every time someone reminds us that happiness can be neither assumed nor earned; that we are all prisoners of our own flawed brains; that the ultimate aloneness in each of us is, finally, inviolable.","author":"Andrew Solomon","tags":["time","hope","great "],"id":88764,"author_id":"Andrew+Solomon"},{"text":"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.","author":"Andrew Solomon","tags":["school","environmental "],"id":91329,"author_id":"Andrew+Solomon"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":45,"pages":5,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}