Andrew Solomon Loss Quotations

I had known a couple of people who had died, but the loss of my mother contained something of the profoundly unknowable.

If your love didn't always contain the possibility of loss, it would be very different from human love as we know it.

I had always thought of myself as fairly tough and fairly strong and fairly able to cope with anything. And then I had a series of personal losses. My mother died. A relationship that I was in came to end, and a variety of other things went awry.

That, in essence, is the catastrophe of suicide for those who survive: not only the loss of someone, but the loss of the chance to persuade that person to act differently, the loss of the chance to connect.

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.