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Andrew Solomon Quotes about Pain

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

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

Andrew Solomon
Pain, Believe, Bears
"How the Worst Moments in Our Lives Make Us Who We Are". TED Talks, andrewsolomon.com. March 21, 2014.

We don't seek the painful experiences that hew our identities, but we seek our identities in the wake of painful experiences. We cannot bear a pointless torment, but we can endure great pain if we believe that it's purposeful. Ease makes less of an impression on us than struggle. We could have been ourselves without our delights, but not without the misfortunes that drive our search for meaning. 'Therefore, I take pleasure in infirmities,' St. Paul wrote in Second Corinthians, 'for when I am weak, then I am strong.'

Andrew Solomon
Motivational, Strong, Pain

Mild depression is a gradual and sometimes permanent thing that undermines people the way rust weakens iron ... Like physical pain that becomes chronic, it is miserable not so much because it is intolerable in the moment as because it is intolerable to have known it in the moments gone and to look forward only to knowing it in the moments to come.

Andrew Solomon
Pain, Iron, Knowing
Andrew Solomon (2014). “The Noonday Demon: An Atlas Of Depression”, p.16, Simon and Schuster

When I remember how unhappy I was in adolescence - about the fact that, though I wasn't really using the term to or for myself, I knew that I was gay - I think, "Oh, if someone then could have shown me just an hour in the life that I have now, I would have made it through all of that misery and despair just fine." The pain lay in thinking that I had a desolate future.

Andrew Solomon
Pain, Gay, Thinking
Source: andrewsolomon.com

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