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There is a Russian expression: if you wake up feeling no pain, you know you're dead. While life is not only about pain, the experience of pain, which is particular in its intensity, is one of the surest signs of the life force.
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Andrew Solomon |
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I went to Cambodia to be humbled by the pain of others, and I was humbled down to the ground.
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Andrew Solomon |
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I had to know the stories these women had to tell," she explained, "because I wanted to understand very specifically what each one had to vanquish."
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Andrew Solomon |
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Thinking seems to me less persuasive evidence of being than does choosing. Not in our chemistry and not in circumstance does our humanity lie, but in our will to work with the technologies available to us through the era in which we live, through our own character, through our circumstances and age.
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Andrew Solomon |
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Biology is not destiny. There are ways to lead a good life with depression. Indeed, people who learn from their depression can develop a particular moral profundity from the experience, and this is the thing with feathers at the bottom of their box of miseries.
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Andrew Solomon |
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In an important study done in 1979, researchers demonstrated that any form of therapy could be effective if certain criteria were met: that both the therapist and the patient were acting in good faith; that the client believed that the therapist understood the technique; and that the client liked and respected the therapist; and that the therapist had an ability to form understanding relationships. The experimenters chose English professors..
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Andrew Solomon |
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claiming
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Andrew Solomon |
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Aunque muchos de nosotros nos sentimos orgullosos de lo diferentes que somos de nuestros padres, nos entristece lo diferentes que nuestros hijos son de nosotros.
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Andrew Solomon |
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floundered
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Andrew Solomon |
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There is no contradiction between loving someone and feeling burdened by that person; indeed, love tends to magnify the burden. These parents need space for their ambivalence, whether they can allow it for themselves or not. For those who love, there should be no shame in being exhausted--even in imagining another life.
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Andrew Solomon |
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Unusual bodies have been described throughout history as reflections of sin, as omens from the gods, as the basis for laughter or charity or punishment.
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Andrew Solomon |
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All kinds of attributes make one less able. Illiteracy and poverty are disabilities, and so are stupidity, obesity, and boringness. Extreme age and extreme youth are both disabilities. Faith is a disability insofar as it constrains you from self-interest; atheism is a disability inasmuch as it shields you from hope. One might see power as a disability, too, for the isolation in which it imprisons those who wield it.
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Andrew Solomon |
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We are all differently abled from one another, and context--which is socially constructed--often decides what will be protected and indulged.
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Andrew Solomon |
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No one has ever suggested legal protections for ugly people to make up for the misaligned features that will compromise their personal and professional lives. For people disabled by inherent moral perplexity, we offer not support but imprisonment.
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Andrew Solomon |
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The Princeton ethicist Peter Singer has espoused the right of women to choose abortion through to the end of pregnancy and to commit infanticide on newborns if they so choose. He has defended this position with the utilitarian argument that most women who eliminate an unwanted child will produce a wanted one, and that the loss of happiness of the child who is killed is outweighed by the happiness of the healthy child who follows. 1zAlthough..
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Andrew Solomon |