“There is a moment, if you trip or slip, before your hand shoots out to break your fall, when you feel the earth rushing up at you and you cannot help yourself, a passing, fraction-of-a-second terror. I felt that way hour after hour after hour. Being anxious at this extreme level is bizarre. You feel all the time that you want to do something, that there is some affect that is unavailable to you, that there’s a physical need of impossible urgency and discomfort for which there is no relief, as though you were constantly vomiting from your stomach but had no mouth.”

American writer on politics, culture and psychology

Andrew Solomon is an American writer on politics, culture and psychology. He has 93 quotes on the site and has written widely across major magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, and Travel and Leisure. His work ranges across subjects such as depression, Soviet artists, the cultural rebirth of Afghanistan, Libyan politics, and deaf culture. That breadth gives his writing a distinctly public and reflective character, moving between personal and political life, culture, and mental health.