Normality Quotes

“There are no norms. All people are exceptions to a rule that doesn’t exist.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“The only people we can think of as normal are those we don't yet know very well.”
― Alain de Botton

“The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well.”
― Joe Ancis

“A man does not have to feel less than human to realize his sin; oppositely, he has to realize that he gets no special vindication for his sin.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Normality is the Great Neurosis of civilization.”
― Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

“So I close this long reflection on what I hope is a not-too-quaveringly semi-Semitic note. When I am at home, I will only enter a synagogue for the bar or bat mitzvah of a friend's child, or in order to have a debate with the faithful. (When I was to be wed, I chose a rabbi named Robert Goldburg, an Einsteinian and a Shakespearean and a Spinozist, who had married Arthur Miller to Marilyn Monroe and had a copy of Marilyn’s conversion certificate. He conducted the ceremony in Victor and Annie Navasky's front room, with David Rieff and Steve Wasserman as my best of men.) I wanted to do something to acknowledge, and to knit up, the broken continuity between me and my German-Polish forebears. When I am traveling, I will stop at the shul if it is in a country where Jews are under threat, or dying out, or were once persecuted. This has taken me down queer and sad little side streets in Morocco and Tunisia and Eritrea and India, and in Damascus and Budapest and Prague and Istanbul, more than once to temples that have recently been desecrated by the new breed of racist Islamic gangster. (I have also had quite serious discussions, with Iraqi Kurdish friends, about the possibility of Jews genuinely returning in friendship to the places in northern Iraq from which they were once expelled.) I hate the idea that the dispossession of one people should be held hostage to the victimhood of another, as it is in the Middle East and as it was in Eastern Europe. But I find myself somehow assuming that Jewishness and 'normality' are in some profound way noncompatible. The most gracious thing said to me when I discovered my family secret was by Martin, who after a long evening of ironic reflection said quite simply: 'Hitch, I find that I am a little envious of you.' I choose to think that this proved, once again, his appreciation for the nuances of risk, uncertainty, ambivalence, and ambiguity. These happen to be the very things that 'security' and 'normality,' rather like the fantasy of salvation, cannot purchase.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Living is abnormal.”
― Eugène Ionesco

“What does all this mean finally, I kept asking like a college kid. Why does it make me want to cry? Maybe it’s that we are all outsiders, we are all making our own unusual way through a wilderness of
normality that is just a myth.”
― Anne Rice, Exit to Eden

“Being famous is wicked, but being normal is better.”
― Rupert Grint

“I have a strange illusion quite often. I think I've become deaf. I have to make a little noise to prove I'm not. I clear my throat to show myself that everything is normal. It's like the little Japanese girl they found in the ruins of Hiroshima. Everything dead; and she was singing to her doll.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“Nothing will be healed in this kitchen. Some griefs can never be put right ... She only wants a tide of normality to wash in and cover everything again.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“We sense that ‘normal’ isn’t coming back, that we are being born into a new normal: a new kind of society, a new relationship to the earth, a new experience of being human.”
― Charles Eisenstein

“Normality wasn't in the days I'd left behind me: it was only to be found in whatever fortune placed in my path each morning.”
― Maria Duenas

“Normal....
What the majority of people look, act, and talk and like.
So what if the majority became what we see as wierd now?
Would our normal, become our new wierd?”
― Catherine

“You must have wished a million times to be normal.”
“No.”
“No?”
“I’ve wished I had two heads. Or that I was invisible. I’ve wished for a fish’s tail instead of legs. I’ve wished to be more special.”
“Not normal?”
“Never.”
― Katherine Dunn, Geek Love

“In a world turned upside-down, where everything was wrong, bizarre, you could at least look up at the sky and see normality. Stars that shone regardless of who won a civil war, or who should or should not be a president. Their light was billions of years old. They didn't have a care...”
― Alex Scarrow, The Eternal War

“What we call 'normal' is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience.”
― R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience/The Bird of Paradise

“Don’t pass on your passions, to settle in the stale normality. Endure. Strive. Ensure.”
― Anthony Liccione

“The norms were created by somebody, and each of us is somebody. We can make our own normal.”
― Glennon Doyle, Untamed: Stop Pleasing, Start Living / A Toolkit for Modern Life

“[T]he normal and the everyday are often amazingly unstoppable, and what is unimaginable is the cessation of them. The world is resilient, and, no matter what interruptions occur, people so badly want to return to their lives and get on with them. A veneer of civilization descends quickly, like a shining rain. Dust is settled.”
― Lorrie Moore

“-Oamenii care intarzie de obicei nu inteleg niciodata nenumaratele moduri in care dau peste cap programul celor punctuali si normali, ii spuse Penn in timp ce tranversau o portiune mai alunecoasa a peluzei.”
― Lauren Kate, Fallen

“Just because something is normal, does not make it morally justified. Case in point: Antisemitism in Nazi Germany.”
― Narcissismus Decimus Maximus

“Were they normal? What a question to ask! And it is always those who know nothing about human nature, who are bored by psychology and shocked by physiology, who ask it.”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“One day I'm a normal person with a normal life,” he said. “The next I'm standing on a street corner in Madrid with a secret phone and a hole in my arm and I'm bleeding all over, hoping I don't get arrested. It was completely crazy. But it seemed like the only way at the time.”
― Tyler Hamilton, The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France: Doping, Cover-ups, and Winning at All Costs

“In this view, it takes all kinds of minds for society to function, and thus normality should not be assumed to be superior to divergence. Rather, there were many kinds of minds. Each was enabled or disabled in different environments, and no single one was naturally superior to all the others.”
― Robert Chapman, Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism

“Walking down a street I see, in those who pass by me, not the facial expressions that they really have but the expressions that they would have if they knew what I'm like and the kind of life I lead, if my face and my gestures betrayed the shy and ridiculous abnormality of my soul. In eyes that don't even look at me I suspect there are smirks (which I consider only natural) directed at the awkward exception I embody in a world of people who know how to act and to enjoy life; and the passing physiognomies, informed by an awareness that I myself have interposed and superimposed, seem to snicker out loud at my life's timid gesticulations.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“In turn, they began to argue that perhaps the problems they all experienced had less to do with their brains being brokem, and more to do with societal failure to accommodate their neurological differences. They thus started to argue for what one 1997 report from the New York Times described as a form of ‘neurological pluralism’. This emphasised the need for the behaviours and processing styles of atypical people to be accepted and supported rather than framed as medical pathologies to be controlled, treated, and cured.”
― Robert Chapman, Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism

“Through the neurodiversity lens I began to wonder, for instance, whether since the very start, I had been disabled by a neuronormative society. This, I came to see, had hindered my learning, my development, and my prospects right from the beginning of life. I also began to understand my trauma and mental illness as stemming from not just relative poverty and parental neglect but also a structurally ableist world.”
― Robert Chapman, Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism

“The hope was to end neurodivergent oppression everywhere by redesigning the world in ways that would cultivate neurodivergent thriving”
― Robert Chapman, Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism

“The part of us that wants to be married and have a family is the part that wants to be normal, like other people, set on the path we were raised to believe was the right path--not just to happiness, but to respectability, acceptance, community. The part of us that wants love-potion-strength romance is the part that wants to go mad.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables