Far & Away Quotes

“[I]f you live abroad any good while, the notion of home is permanently compromised. You will always be missing another place, and no national logic will ever again seem fully obvious to you.”
― Andrew Solomon, Far & Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change: Seven Continents, Twenty-Five Years

“I understood that going where I would actually be foreign might distract people from the more intimate nature of my defining otherness.”
― Andrew Solomon, Far & Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change: Seven Continents, Twenty-Five Years

“Actually travel is the opposite of depression. Depression is a curling inward, and travel is an opening outward.”
― Andrew Solomon, Far and Away: How Travel Can Change the World

“Oppression sometimes benefits its victims more than its perpetrators.”
― Andrew Solomon, Far & Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change: Seven Continents, Twenty-Five Years

“You cannot understand the otherness of places you have not encountered. If all young adults were required to spend two weeks in a foreign country, two-thirds of the world's diplomatic problems could be solved. It wouldn't matter what country they visited or what they did during their stays.”
― Andrew Solomon, Far & Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change: Seven Continents, Twenty-Five Years

“Travel is a set of corrective lenses that helps focus the planet's blurred reality.”
― Andrew Solomon, Far & Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change: Seven Continents, Twenty-Five Years

“The artists found out long ago that the way to combat a government that presents lies as if they were the truth is to tell the truth as if it were a joke. Humor became a means of encoded communication, and so long as they made jokes they could be vocal and invulnerable.”
― Andrew Solomon, Far & Away: Essays from the Brink of Change, Seven Continents, Twenty-Five Years

“As we talked, I came to understand that hope is like a happy childhood; it equips its beneficiaries to deal with the traumas that inevitably ensue. It is experienced as primal love. (p.15)”
― Andrew Solomon, Far & Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change: Seven Continents, Twenty-Five Years

“No one had forewarned me, however, that if you live abroad any good while, the notion of home is permanently compromised.”
― Andrew Solomon, Far & Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change: Seven Continents, Twenty-Five Years

“You can't fit in with people by pretending to be just like they are; you fit in by engaging in a dialogue about your differences, and by putting aside the assumption that your way of life is in any way preferable to theirs.”
― Andrew Solomon, Far & Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change: Seven Continents, Twenty-Five Years

“A crushed hope is suffused with a nobility that mere hopelessness can never know.”
― Andrew Solomon, Far & Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change: Seven Continents, Twenty-Five Years

“A witness can be of more value than a policy analyst. An amateur witness, free of conceptual bias, sometimes sees the plainest truth. One should never be blinded by tailoring.”
― Andrew Solomon, Far & Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change: Seven Continents, Twenty-Five Years

“[P]laces that seem lovely at first glance may actually be sinister, but places that feel sinister seldom turn out to be lovely.”
― Andrew Solomon, Far & Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change: Seven Continents, Twenty-Five Years