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

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

“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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“...and once people start to believe in these categories, their imagination becomes domesticated. Since capitalism doesn't only shape lives but also identities, they begin to critique themselves using the system’s own logic—feeling guilt for not being “productive,” anxiety for not being “attractive,” or shame for not being “confident and sociable.”
― Sov8840

“Normal people have nothing to forget, for they never even possess the ability to form memories—because they do not have an inner life to begin with.”
― Sov8840

“Questions like “Is this normal?” or “Am I weird?” reveal how deeply the concept of being “normal” is embedded in the subconscious of the ordinary majority. They don’t mean “Is this ordinary?” or “Am I a product of a photocopy?” when they ask these things, of course. In fact, they are not even consciously trying to conform to norms, even if their words might suggest otherwise. It is simply that they have internalized the association of the word “normal” with the idea of “good.”
― Sov8840

“As long as society continues to regard views that contradict the majority not as expressions of reality but merely as “different perspectives,” it will not mature.”
― Sov8840

“Any judgment born of collective agreement is, by nature, arbitrary, no matter how widely it is accepted.”
― Sov8840

“At its worst, the purpose of a psych ward is to normalize you back into a community that is anything but. Its purpose is not to heal you, but to make you stay sick so that you can function alongside the lies of a country steeped in them, so you can function alongside the lies you are forced to tell about yourself. We are all doubling in order to live, and the psych ward tells you to squash that inner knowing. It's simply not useful if you hope to thrive. At its best, psychiatric care gives you tools to let your inner knowing walk alongside the insanity of the world and create survival tools to trust what you know and survive the gaslighting and discrimination that seeks to burn down your house.”
― P. Carl, Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition