Andrew Solomon Men Quotations

I got into my first serious relationship with a man when I was twenty-three. I had, before that, sort of a typical, sad history of relatively promiscuous sexual encounters with men I didn't know, because I felt that if I were involved with people I did know, other people would know that I was gay, and it was something that I needed to keep so secret.

I believe that organized religion is an ornament to the truth, and that aesthetics are part of its power.

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.

The campaign against polygamy, around which a lot of anti-Mormon sentiment was organized, seems horrific to me.

I spent years thinking I had to make a choice between being true to myself and being with a man and not having a family, and trying to live something of a lie and being with a woman and having children ...

There is a tendency to dehumanize kids that commit crimes. The system is focused on punishment, not on rehabilitation. These kids are the most misunderstood and most cruelly treated.

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.

I hated being depressed, but it was also in depression that I learned my own acreage, the full extent of my soul.

I can see the beauty of glass objects fully at the moment when they slip from my hand

The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, and it was vitality that seemed to seep away from me in that moment.