Winter

“Belonging is one of the things that makes life bearable, and it can be tough to look at a binary world and choose against both sides.”
― Andrew Solomon, Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

“In the heat of an argument, my mother once told me, "Someday you can go to a therapist and tell him all about how your terrible mother ruined your life. But it will be your ruined life you're talking about. So make a life for yourself in which you can feel happy, and in which you can love and be loved, because that's what's actually important." You can love someone but not accept him; you can accept someone but not love him. I wrongly felt the flaws in my parents' acceptance as deficits in their love. Now, I think their primary experience was of having a child who spoke a language they'd never thought of studying.”
― Andrew Solomon, Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

“To look deep into your child's eyes and see in him both yourself and something utterly strange, and then to develop a zealous attachment to every aspect of him, is to achieve parenthood's self-regarding, yet unselfish, abandon. It is astonishing how often such mutuality had been realized - how frequently parents who had supposed that they couldn't care for an exceptional child discover that they can. The parental predisposition to love prevails in the most harrowing of circumstances. There is more imagination in the world than one might think.”
― Andrew Solomon, Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

“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.”
― Andrew Solomon, Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity