408 Quotes by Andrew Solomon

"If you banish the dragons, you banish the heroes."

"After you've forged meaning, you need to incorporate that meaning into a new identity, 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 have caused you hurt."

"Forge meaning, build identity and then invite the world to share your joy"

"Oppression breeds the power to oppose it"

"We cannot bear a pointless torment, but we can endure great pain if we believe that it's purposeful."

"There's always somebody who wants to confiscate our humanity. And there are always stories that restore it"

"When an illness is viewed as inexplicable and impenetrable, people tend to react to it with one of two extremes: either they stigmatize it or they romanticize it."

"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."

"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."

"To want to kill yourself, however, requires a whole extra level of passion and a certain directed violence."