Depression is the flaw in love. There's no such thing as love without the anticipation of loss. And that specter of despair can be the engine of intimacy.
Andrew SolomonRead
Then I repeated these words to my spirits: 'Leave me be; give me peace; and let me do the work of my life. I will never forget you.' Something about that incantation was particularly appealing to me. 'I will never forget you'-- as though one had to address the pride of the spirits, as though one wanted them to feel good about being exorcised.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the desire for inner peace while acknowledging the significance of one's past experiences.
In this quote, Andrew Solomon expresses a yearning for tranquility and the freedom to pursue his life's work, while also recognizing the emotional weight of the spirits from his past. It suggests that achieving peace requires a delicate balance of acknowledging one's history and moving forward, indicating that the act of letting go does not erase memories; instead, it honors them while allowing for personal growth.
In practice
This quote could be shared during a motivational speech about pursuing one's passions.
Depression is the flaw in love. There's no such thing as love without the anticipation of loss. And that specter of despair can be the engine of intimacy.
I don't accept subtractive models of love, only additive ones. And I believe that in the same way we need species diversity to ensure that the planet can go on, so we need this diversity of affection and diversity of family in order to strengthen the ecosphere of kindness.
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.
I believe that words are strong, that they can overwhelm what we fear when fear seems more awful than life is good.
Some people are trapped by the belief that love comes in finite quantities, and that our kind of love exhausts the supply upon which they need to draw. I do not accept competitive models of love, only additive ones.
Antonin Artaud wrote on one of his drawings, "Never real and always true," and that is how depression feels. You know that it is not real, that you are someone else, and yet you know that it is absolutely true.
Perhaps there is no more dangerous place for a Christian to be than in safety and comfort, detached from the suffering of others.
Wealth is an inborn attitude of mind, like poverty. The pauper who has made his pile may flaunt his spoils, but cannot wear them plausibly.
One thing only do I know for certain and that is that man's judgments of value follow directly his wishes for happiness-that, accordingly, they are an attempt to support his illusions with arguments. [p.111]
Whether as victim, demon, or hero, the industrial worker of the past century filled the public imagination in books, movies, news stories, and even popular songs, putting a grimy human face on capitalism while dramatizing the social changes and conflicts it brought.
There is a spiritual hunger in the world today - and it cannot be satisfied by better cars on longer credit terms.
What you don't understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.
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