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Book: The Noonday Demon
Quotes of Book: The Noonday Demon

Andrew Solomon _ The Noonday Demon
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 with this quality of human understanding and found that, on average, the English professors were able to help their patients as much as the professional therapists.
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Andrew Solomon _ The Noonday Demon
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 _ The Noonday Demon
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 _ The Noonday Demon
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 _ The Noonday Demon
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 _ The Noonday Demon
It is mad for adolescents to rage at parents who have done their best, but it is a conventional madness, uniform enough so that we tolerate it relatively unquestioningly.
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Andrew Solomon _ The Noonday Demon
We must look for faith {in anything: God or the self or other people or politics or beauty or just about anything else} and structure. We must help the disenfranchised whose suffering undermines so much of the world's joy-for the sake both of those huddled masses and of the privileged people who lack profound motivation in their own lives. We must practice the business of love, and we must teach it too.
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Andrew Solomon _ The Noonday Demon
I love the sense of vast transformation that hangs on us at this new millennium, the feeling that we are at the brink of knowing more than people have ever known before.
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Andrew Solomon _ The Noonday Demon
It seemed to take the most colossal effort to do simple things. I remember bursting into tears because I had used up the cake of soap that was in the shower. I cried because one of the keys stuck for a second on my computer. I found everything excruciatingly difficult, and so, for example, the prospect of lifting the telephone receiver seemed to me like bench-pressing four hundred pounds. The reality that I had to put on not just one but two socks and then two shoes so overwhelmed me that I wanted to go back to bed.
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Andrew Solomon _ The Noonday Demon
. . . With the wonder and bitterness of someone pardoned for a crime she did not commit I come back to marriage and friends, to pink fringed hollyhocks; come back to my desk, books, and chair.
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Andrew Solomon _ The Noonday Demon
About half of patients with pure anxiety disorders develop major depression within five years. Insofar as depression and anxiety are genetically determined, they share a single set of genes {which are tied to the genes for alcoholism}. Depression exacerbated by anxiety has a much higher suicide rate than depression alone, and it is much harder to recover from. "If you're having several panic attacks every day," says Ballenger, "it's gonna bring Hannibal to his knees. People are beaten into a pulp, into a fetal position in bed."
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Andrew Solomon _ The Noonday Demon
present tense of mild depression envisages no alleviation because it feels like knowledge.
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