Abnormal Quotes

In light of the unbroken record of invoking God's name in foundational documents throughout the world, throughout the colonies, and throughout history, the stubborn refusal of the US Constitution to invoke the Almighty is abnormal, historic, radical, and not accidental. But liberals miss a basic point, too: The framers of the Constitution were not contemplating the role of "government" in religion. They were debating the role of the national government in religion. ~ Steven Waldman

All this mental illness of our occurred simply bc we lived immorally. We suffered from our immoral life, to smother our suffering we committed various abnormal acts.
I disliked him, bc I understood that he was a dirty adulterer. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Our lives are part of a unique adventure ... Nevertheless, most of us think the world is 'normal' and are constantly hunting for something abnormal
like angels or Martians. But that is just because we don't realize the world is a mystery. As for myself, I felt completely different. I saw the world as an amazing dream. I was hunting for some kind of explanation of how everything fit together. ~ Jostein Gaarder

I think we all have something in our life's experience that makes us feel different. It's whether we have a gay parent or we have an alcoholic mother or maybe we don't know our father. And it's something that we feel bad about initially because we think we're abnormal. What's abnormal is our assumption that there's something called 'normal.' ~ Amy Richards

Don't ever call me Princess again," she said, head still resting in my shoulder.

"Did I do that?" I asked.

"Yes, you did."

"I don't remember."

"Driving back from Tsujido, that night. Don't say it again."

"I won't. I promise I won't. I swear on Boy George and Duran Duran. Never, never, never again."

"That's what Mama always calls me. Princess."

"I won't call you that again."

"Mama, she's always hurting me. She's just got no idea. And yet she loves me. I know she does."

"Yes, she does."

"So what am I supposed to do?"

"The only thing you can. Grow up."

"I don't want to."

"No other way," I said. "Everyone does, like it or not. People get older. That's how they deal with it. They deal with it till the day they die. It's always been this way. Always will be. It's not just you."

She looked up at me, her face streaked with tears. "Don't you believe in comforting people?"

"I was comforting you."

She brushed my arm from her shoulder and took a tissue from her bag. "There's something really abnormal about you, you know," she said. ~ Haruki Murakami

Autism is a neurological disorder. It's not caused by bad parenting. It's caused by, you know, abnormal development in the brain. The emotional circuits in the brain are abnormal. And there also are differences in the white matter, which is the brain's computer cables that hook up the different brain departments. ~ Temple Grandin

There's also something that is often mistaken for enlightenment which is a kind of insanity. Often, people will have some kind of weird experience which is quite abnormal and think, "Oh my God, that's it, I understand everything" because they start seeing things in a very weird way and think that's how enlightened people see things as well. ~ Brad Warner

In writing the first edition of Japan's International Relations we aimed to provide a comprehensive analysis of Japan as a normal state, rather than as an aberrant or abnormal state. ~ Glenn D. Hook

Communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought - frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

It is not possible to think of a way of screening out effectively the most appropriate embryos, and hence, what we should expect would be late abortions
either occurring spontaneously or being induced deliberately in the second or third trimester of pregnancy
in order to prevent the birth of abnormal children. ~ Ian Wilmut

I truly cannot imagine men with men, women with women, doing what they were not physically created to do, without abnormal stress and misbehavior. ~ Jerry Falwell

Even the most normal person, if placed in a highly abnormal situation, can be mistakenly perceived as the source of abnormality of the person/circumstance aggregate ~ Rivka Galchen

What could she have been thinking about? Not much, I guess; not back then, not at the time. She was thinking about how not to think. The times were abnormal. She ~ Margaret Atwood

I think it was Lessing who once said, 'There are things which must cause you to lose your reason or you have none to lose'. An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behaviour. ~ Viktor E. Frankl

When I look at our whole Earth, the galaxy and even the universe, full of beautiful constellations and Earth-like planets, I can't stop questioning why do people think they are so important to the point of using others, feeling jealousy and hatred towards those who expose them to something they can't confront, such as their weaknesses, imperfections, failures, fears and attachments. But whichever path I choose, the answer always comes as one: Everyone's reality matches them, and they will never recover from whatever occurs to them for as long as they call home to this Mental Institution called Earth, for as long as they call normal to what is abnormal, and for as long as they are satisfied with themselves. Earth can show mercy but never regret or remorse, for whenever death approaches with its message, the message always says the same, independently of who reads it: start again. ~ Robin Sacredfire

The ordinary man is living a very abnormal life, because his values are upside down. Money is more important than meditation; logic is more important than love; mind is more important than heart; power over others is more important than power over one's own being. Mundane things are more important than finding some treasures which death cannot destroy. ~ Rajneesh

From a young age her life has been abnormal, she knows that. But so much is covered over in time now, the way leaves fall and cover a piece of earth, and eventually mingle with the soil. Things that happened to her then are buried in the earth of her body. ~ Sally Rooney

I didn't want us to abnormal. I didn't want all this chaos and underworld crap ... but that's where we'd come from. The choas was part of us. Part of what we were. And I was afraid if we lost it completely, we might lose part of ourselves ... ~ Kevin Brooks

Smoothly he asked Winslow if he had been to any Christmas parties.
"Certainly not, my dear Orbell."
"Have you really neglected everyone?"
"I gave up going to my colleagues' wives' parties before you were born, my dear young man," Winslow said.
He added: "I have no small talk."
He made the remark with complacency, as though he had an abnormal amount of great talk. ~ C.P. Snow

My mom said it's different when it's the woman who's violent. It strikes people as abnormal. Like, it's natural for a guy to just 'lose his temper,' but if a woman does the same thing, then it's a sign of something deeper wrong, like psychologically or almost metaphysically. ~ Rufi Thorpe

I'm inclined to reserve all judgement, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Look, de Mazel, you've known him for years - hasn't he been known to sleep for forty hours in two days?'

'Forty hours?'

'Certainly. He awoke at meal times, just to take nourishment, and afterwards fell again into his torpor. And Freneuse had a strange horror of sleep; there was some abnormal phenomenon associated with it, some lesion of the brain or neurotic depression.'

'The troublesome cerebral anaemia which results from excessive debauchery. Another myth! I've never believed, myself, in the supposed debauchery of that poor gentleman. Such a frail chap, with such a delicate complexion! Quite frankly, there was no scope in him for debauchery.

'Pooh! About as much as Lorenzaccio!'

'You associate him with the Medicis! Lorenzaccio was a Florentine impassioned by rancour, a man of energy slowly brooding over his vengeance, caressing it as he might caress the blade of a dagger! There is not the slightest comparison to be drawn between Lorenzaccio and that gall-green, liverish creature Freneuse. ~ Jean Lorrain

There comes a time or two in life when you should face isolation. No, you have to. Constantly being accompanied, having someone by your side always and forever -- that is far more abnormal and creepy. I'm positive you can only learn and feel certain things when you're alone. If there are lessons to gain from having friends, then so also are there lessons from not having friends. These two things are two sides of the same coin and should be treated as equally valuable. So this moment, too, will also have worth for that girl. ~ Wataru Watari

I've never had an interest, but baseball looks abnormal. ~ Emily J. Proctor

In the throws of depression, one reaches a strange point at which it is impossible to see the line between ones own theatricality and the reality of madness. I discovered two conflicting qualities of character. I am melodramatic by nature; on the other hand, I can go out and "seem normal" under the most abnormal of circumstances. Antonin Artaud wrote on one of his drawings, "never real and always true", and that is how depression feels. You know that it is not real, that you are someone else, and yet you know that it is absolutely true. Its very confusing. ~ Andrew Solomon

I couldn't think of anything other than her and the components of her. For example, her red hair. But was I so primitive I let myself be bewitched by hair? I mean, really. Hair! It's just hair! Everyone has it! She puts it up, she lets it down. So what? And why did all the other parts of her have me wheezing with delight? I mean, who hasn't got a back, or a belly, or armpits? This whole finicky obsession serves to humiliate me even as I write it, sure, but I suppose it isn't that abnormal. That's what first love is all about. What happens is you meet a love object and immediately a hole inside you starts aching, the hole that is always there but you don't notice until someone comes along, plugs it up, and then runs away with the plug. ~ Steve Toltz

After this Daisy was never at home, and Winterbourne ceased to meet her at the houses of their common acquaintances, because, as he perceived, these shrewd people had quite made up their minds that she was going too far. They ceased to invite her, and they intimated that they desired to express observant Europeans the great truth that, though Miss Daisy Miller was a young American lady, her behaviour was not representative - was regarded by her compatriots as abnormal. Winterbourne wondered how she felt about all the cold shoulders that were turned towards her, and sometimes it annoyed him to suspect that she did not feel at all. He said to himself that she was too light and childish, too uncultivated and unreasoning, too provincial, to have reflected upon her ostracism or even to have perceived it. Then at other moments he believed that she carried about in her elegant and irresponsible little organism a defiant, passionate, perfectly observant consciousness of the impression she produced. He asked himself whether Daisy's defiance came from the consciousness of innocence or from her being, essentially, a young person of the reckless class. It must be admitted that holding oneself to a belief in Daisy's "innocence" came to see Winterbourne more and more a matter of fine-spun gallantry. As I have already had occasion to relate, he was angry at finding himself reduced to chopping logic about this young lady; he was vexed at his want of instinctive certitude as to how far her ec ~ Henry James

What is a look of absolute fear? Popescu asked. The doctor belched a few times, shifted in his chair, and answered that it was a kind of look of mercy, but empty, as if all that were left of mercy, after a mysterious voyage, was the skin, as if mercy were a skin of water, say, in the hands of a Tatar horseman who gallops away over the steppe and dwindles untile he vanishes, and then the horseman returns, or the ghost of the horseman returns, or his shadow, or the idea of him, and he has the skin, empty of water now, because he drank it all during his trip, or he and his horse drank it, and the skin is empty now, it's a normal skin, an empty skin, because after all the abnormal thing is a skin swollen with water, but this skin swollen with water, this hideous skin swollen with water doesn't arouse fear, doesn't awaken it, much less isolate it, but the empty skin does, and that was what he saw in the mathematician's face, absolute fear. ~ Roberto Bolano

Our "increasing mental sickness" may find expres­sion in neurotic symptoms. These symptoms are con­spicuous and extremely distressing. But "let us beware," says Dr. Fromm, "of defining mental hygiene as the prevention of symptoms. Symptoms as such are not our enemy, but our friend; where there are symp­toms there is conflict, and conflict always indicates that the forces of life which strive for integration and happiness are still fighting." The really hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. "Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been si­lenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does." They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their per­fect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted, still cherish "the illusion of indi­viduality," but in fact they have been to a great extent deindividualized. Their conformity is developing into something like uniformity. But "uniformity and free­dom are incompatible. Uniformity and mental health are incompatible too. . . . Man is not made to be an automaton, and if he becom ~ Aldous Huxley

But, what if?
Hadn't we wondered as little girls if we were the only ones with the ability? Were we the only freaks? Were we the abnormal among the normal looking for the abnormal to become the normal?
I raced back to my room. ~ Michelle Flick

An agile but unintelligent and abnormal German, possessed of the mania of grandeur. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Children are amazingly adaptable. What would be grotesquely abnormal became my normality in the prisoner of war camps. It became routine for me to line up three times a day to eat lousy food in a noisy mess hall. It became normal for me to go with my father to bathe in a mass shower. ~ George Takei

When we consider that labor is the producer of all wealth, is it not evident that the impoverishment and, dependence of labor are abnormal conditions resulting from restrictions and usurpations, and that instead of accepting protection, what labor should demand is freedom. That those who advocate any extension of freedom choose to go no further than suits their own special purpose is no reason why freedom itself should be distrusted. ~ Henry George

Never strive to be part of the norm. If people think you strange ... CELEBRATE. Normal people try way to hard to please others and never end up pleasing themselves. Be ABnormal. It's more fun. ~ Shelley K. Wall

There is an alarming increase of violence and harassment against gay people, something that is being legitimized by the regime as they brand homosexuality as something abnormal and dangerous to children. ~ Cecilia Malmstrom

Your Englishman, confronted by something abnormal will always pretend that it isn't there. If, however, you force him to look into it, he'll at once pretend that he sees the object not for what it is but for something that he would like it to be. ~ James Agate

We need an enemy to give people hope. Someone said that patriotism is the last refuge of cowards: those without moral principles usually wrap a flag around themselves, and the bastards always talk about the purity of the race. National identity is the last bastion of the dispossessed. But the meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same. Hatred has to be cultivated as a civic passion. The enemy is the friend of the people. You always want someone to hate in order to feel justified in your own misery. Hatred is the primordial passion. It is love that's abnormal. ~ Umberto Eco

The need to imitate that the consumer experiences is truly an infantile need, one determined by every aspect of his fundamental disposession. In terms used by Gabel to describe quite another level of pathology, "the abnormal need for representation here compensates for a torturing feeling of being at the margin of existence". ~ Guy Debord

Depressed people think they know themselves, but maybe they only know depression. ~ Mark Epstein

Sometimes you're going to have to let one person go a thousand different times, a thousand different ways, and there's nothing pathetic or abnormal about that. You are human. ~ Heidi Priebe

It has been brought to our notice that we have been in the habit of regarding the connection between the sexual instinct and the sexual object as more intimate than it in fact is. Experience of the cases that are considered abnormal has shown us that in them the sexual instinct and the sexual object are merely soldered together - a fact which we have been in danger of overlooking in consequence of the uniformity of the normal picture, where the object appears to form part and parcel of the instinct. We are thus warned to loosen the bond that exists in our thoughts between instinct and object. It seems probable that the sexual instinct is in the first instance independent of its object; nor is its origin likely to be due to its object's attractions. ~ Sigmund Freud

There's nothing abnormal about loneliness. ~ Paula Stokes

The church is so subnormal that if it ever got back to the New Testament normal it would seem to people to be abnormal. ~ Vance Havner

Conceive a canvas for a lyrical or fairytale buffoonery, for a pantomime, and translate it into a serious novel. Drown everything in an abnormal and dreamy atmosphere, - in the atmosphere of the great days. - It must be something soothing, - even serene in its passion. - Regions of pure Poetry. ~ Charles Baudelaire

An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior. ~ Viktor E. Frankl

Appetite has really become an artificial and abnormal thing, having taken the place of true hunger, which alone is natural. The one is a sign of bondage but the other, of freedom. ~ Paul Brunton

Everyone has problems. Everyone has a shitty life. But people who embrace that and do something with the misery are seen as the abnormal ones. And the people who apply normalcy like a camouflage suit are seen as the normal ones. ~ Andersen Prunty

Magical obsession is the experience of radical curiosity and wonderment much like the consciousness of a child at Disneyland. It's a state of awareness that presents abnormal, spontaneous opportunities, effortlessly. It is the experience of your wish being the universes desire. ~ Christopher Zzenn Loren

I don't know how long is too long, but I do know that your struggles don't make you weak or abnormal. They make you human. ~ Marcus Harrison Green

Kylee laughed. "Nothing with you is normal. But speaking of abnormal, I saw this movie where these two girls liked the same boy, and one girl was a werewolf, and the other was a dragon, although she didn't know it yet, and it turned out the boy was a killer of, like, magical creatures, so both girls died and he took the head cheerleader to prom."
"That sounds like a stupid movie," I said.
"It actually was. But the boy had this shirt off a lot. I guess hunting magical creatures is great for stomach muscles. ~ Lindsey Leavitt

Young normal tigers do not eat people. If eaten by a tiger you may rest assured he was abnormal. ~ Will Cuppy

When your results are good, you are obviously going to have a lot of press. And when you start to falter a little bit, you are going to have some criticism, and there is nothing abnormal in that. ~ Carlos Ghosn

We cannot selectively numb emotions, when we numb the painful emotions, we also numb the positive emotions. ~ Brene Brown

I have also thought of a model city from which all possible cities can be deduced," Marco answered. "It is a city made only of exceptions, exclusions, incongruities, contradictions. If such a city is the most improbable, by reducing the number of abnormal elements, we increase the probability that the city really exists. So I have only to subtract exceptions from my model, and in whatever direction I proceed, I will arrive at one of the cities which, always as an exception, exist. But I cannot force my operation beyond a certain limit: I would achieve cities too probable to be real. ~ Italo Calvino

Fruit fly scientists, God bless 'em, are the big exceptions. Morgan's team always picked sensibly descriptive names for mutant genes, like 'speck,' 'beaded,' 'rudimentary,' 'white,' and 'abnormal.' And this tradition continues today, as the names of most fruit fly genes eschew jargon and even shade whimsical… The 'turnip' gene makes flies stupid. 'Tudor' leaves males (as with Henry VIII) childless. 'Cleopatra' can kill flies when it interacts with another gene, 'asp.' 'Cheap date' leaves flies exceptionally tipsy after a sip of alcohol… And thankfully, this whimsy with names has inspired the occasional zinger in other areas of genetics… The backronym for the "POK erythroid myeloid ontogenic" gene in mice - 'pokemon' - nearly provoked a lawsuit, since the 'pokemon' gene (now known, sigh, as 'zbtb7') contributes to the spread of cancer, and the lawyers for the Pokemon media empire didn't want their cute little pocket monsters confused with tumors. ~ Sam Kean

I early learned that there were two natures in me. This caused me a great deal of trouble, till I worked out a philosophy of life and struck a compromise between the flesh and the spirit. Too great an ascendancy of either was to be abnormal, and since normality is almost a fetish of mine, I finally succeeded in balancing both natures. Ordinarily they are at equilibrium; yet as frequently as one is permitted to run rampant, so is the other. I have small regard for an utter brute or for an utter saint. ~ Jack London

My characters all have issues, but I don't see that as weird or abnormal because I think in real life there are very few bland, normal people. ~ Sophie Hannah

The world shown us in books, whether the books be confessed epics or professed gospels, or in codes, or in political orations, or in philosophic systems, is not the main world at all: it is only the self-consciousness of certain abnormal people who have the specific artistic talent and temperament. A serious matter this for you and me, because the man whose consciousness does not correspond to that of the majority is a madman; and the old habit of worshipping madmen is giving way to the new habit of locking them up. And since what we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the absolete fictitious for the contemporary real, education, as you no doubt observed at Oxford, destroys, by supplantation, every mind that is not strong enough to see through the imposture and to use the great Masters of Arts as what they really are and no more: that is, patentees of highly questionable methods of thinking, and manufacturers of highly questionable, and for the majority but half valid representations of life. The school boy who uses his Homer to throw at his fellow's head makes perhaps the safest and most rational use of him; and I observe with reassurance that you occasionally do the same, in your prime, with your Aristotle. ~ George Bernard Shaw

This got us thinking, since autistic individuals have been shown to have abnormal amygdalae, perhaps there is also aluminum on the amygdala in children with autism. ~ James Morcan

If you feel bad at 10 miles, you're in trouble. If you feel bad at 20 miles, you're normal. If you don't feel bad at 26 miles, you're abnormal. ~ Robert De Castella

Jealousy is the fear of losing the thing you love most. It's very normal. Suspicion is the thing that's abnormal. ~ Jerry Hall

Religious people are forced to perform mental gymnastics to reconcile real life with their delusions. When Christianity, Islam and the rest of the world religions finally have gone the way of Zeus, they will leave behind a legacy of case studies for students of abnormal psychology. ~ Al Stefanelli

Gingrich was a far more volatile and aggressive individual than Boehner, but the institutional norms of self-restraint, and perhaps even self-interest, have broken down under the pressure of an increasingly abnormal Republican Party. ~ George Packer

I think a brain can be made "more thinking" or made "more emotional." At what point does this become abnormal? Autism in its milder variants, I think, is part of normal human variation. ~ Temple Grandin

Perhaps she would not have thought of wickedness as a state so rare, so abnormal, so exotic, one which it was so refreshing to visit, had she been able to distinguish in herself, as in all her fellow-men and women, that indifference to the sufferings which they cause which, whatever names else be given it, is the one true, terrible and lasting form of cruelty. ~ Marcel Proust

On Ludwig II

"He is not mad enough to be locked up but too abnormal to manage comfortably in the world with reasonable people". ~ Empress Elisabeth Of Austria

I do not use psychiatric terms in my writing because the entrenched and developing behaviours were perfectly normal reactions to abnormal situations. ~ Jane Hersey

Physical science has taught us to associate Deity with the normal rather than with the abnormal. ~ William Edward Hartpole Lecky

I thought you were asleep."

"It doesn't matter, you still thought
those things." Hurt crossed his eyes again. "It's hard enough having your own
mother hate you enough to call the cops on you," he said, dropping the now for
the first time, "but to have the girl who made you fall for her say I wasn't
worth it because I was abnormal, that I was a worse choice than someone
like Tate, and you think I'm cruel? I have nothing
on you, Kady." He went to turn, but I stopped him with a hand to his arm.

"You fell for me?" I asked, shocked by his
words.

He looked away, his jaw tightening,
causing the muscles in his neck to work overtime.

I swallowed, knowing this was it. I had to
say it too, even if he shot me down. "I fell for you, too. ~ Marita A. Hansen

These abnormal aspects included the shapes of UFOs and their behavior. Most of the UFOs seen in the daytime were said to have had simple geometric shapes-discs, ovals, spheres, cylinders-and surfaces that looked like metal. Such shapes are not only nonexistent among known aircraft, but contrary to all known theories of flight, in most cases offering control and performance disadvantages rather than advantages. ~ Don Berliner

The world will try to make you think that being good is outdated and old-fashioned and that popularity comes from breaking the rules and lowering your standards. Don't buy into that way of thinking. As you watch TV or read magazines, you might be made to feel abnormal when, really, you are the one who has it figured out. ~ Margaret D. Nadauld

To avoid a frequent misunderstanding, it cannot be emphasized too strongly that symmetry and complementarity in communication are not ins and by themselves "good" or "bad", "normal" or "abnormal", etc. The two concepts simply refer tp two basic categories into which all communicational interchanges can be divided. ~ Paul Watzlawick

No matter how skillful the trading scheme, over the long haul, abnormal returns are sustained only through abnormal exposure to risk. ~ Alan Greenspan

Chesterton spoke of 'the modern and morbid habit of always sacrificing the normal to the abnormal.' It would be hard to sum up liberalism for succinctly. ~ Joseph Sobran

Taylor Swift on why girls look up to her:
It's the message. I try to have a normal life and look at things in a normal way, under very abnormal circumstances. That's always going to be my main goal, that's always what I'm going to strive for, to be a normal human being. It's interesting because you're put in really abnormal situations. You have an abnormal-size microscope covering your life and everything you do. You look at the idea of being 22, that's when you're supposed to be out there living and being selfish and making mistakes and messing up. If I mess up once, it's a headline everywhere. ~ Taylor Swift

inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

It has always been my belief that children inherit the suppressed tendencies of their parents. A clergyman's son frequently shows abnormal tastes for the pleasures that his father denied himself ... ~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Dr. Mark Crisplin, a Portland, Oregon, ER doctor, reviewed the original EEG readings of a number of patients claimed by the scientists as being flatlined or "dead" and discovered that this was not at all the case. "What they showed was slowing, attenuation, and other changes, but only a minority of patients had a flat line, and it [dying] took longer than 10 seconds. The curious thing was that even a little blood flow in some patients was enough to keep EEGs normal." In fact, most cardiac patients were given CPR, which by definition delivers some oxygen to the brain (that's the whole point of doing it). Crisplin concluded: "By the definitions presented in the Lancet paper, nobody experienced clinical death. No doctor would ever declare a patient in the middle of a code 99 dead, much less brain dead. Having your heart stop for 2 to 10 minutes and being promptly resuscitated doesn't make you 'clinically dead.' It only means your heart isn't beating and you may not be conscious."31 Again, since our normal experience is of stimuli coming into the brain from the outside, when one part of the brain abnormally generates these illusions, another part of the brain - quite possibly the left-hemisphere interpreter described by neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga - interprets them as external events. Hence, the abnormal is interpreted as supernormal or paranormal. ~ Michael Shermer

We are taught to believe that the 'alienation' that we experience sometimes, when we withdraw from everything or feel alone, is a craving for something sexual, material, or in the physical - and can be cured by popping a pill in most cases. When in Truth, it's the circuitry within our souls and minds that is hinting to be connected - to real flowing energy - outside of our TVs and computer monitors. What many of us mistaken for depression is actually a need to be understood, or to see desires come to fruition. There is absolutely nothing abnormal about feeling disconnected. Your sensitivity only means you are more human than most. If you cry, you are alive. I'd be more worried if you didn't. ~ Suzy Kassem

All of us are mad. If it weren't for the fact every one of us is slightly abnormal, there wouldn't be any point in giving each person a separate name. ~ Ugo Betti

We urgently need a debate about the best ways of supporting families in modern America, without blinders that prevent us from seeing the full extent of dependence and interdependence in American life. As long as we pretend that only poor or abnormal families need outside assistance, we will shortchange poor families, overcompensate rich ones, and fail to come up with effective policies for helping families in the middle. ~ Stephanie Coontz

We're altered, we're abnormal, our souls stained with each other's mark. Our souls are that of monsters born in the dark. ~ Pepper Winters

This is one of the most important lines of cleavage between Wall Street practice and the canons of ordinary business. Because the speculative public is clearly wrong in its attitude on this point, it would seem that its errors should afford profitable opportunities to the more logically minded to buy common stocks at the low prices occasioned by temporarily reduced earnings and to sell them at inflated levels created by abnormal prosperity ~ Anonymous

If abnormal weather happens every year, it's not very abnormal, is it? ~ Ken Akamatsu

Most people have only half developed their single personalities. That a man should split his into four and more; and should develop each separately and perfectly, was so abnormal that many normals failed to understand it. ~ Frederick Rolfe

There is a moral imperative to seeing mental health through the same lens we use for other pathologies or illnesses. Being sad or overwhelmed is normal, much as being short of breath after a run is normal. Both become abnormal when they happen with no apparent cause and are hard to stop. Those situations need medical attention. ~ Matthew Goldfinger

I believe, however, that such abnormal moments can be found in everyone, and it is all the more fortunate when they occur in individuals with creative talent or with clairvoyant powers. ~ Giorgio De Chirico

Nothing abnormal about the abnormal!" I laughed and finally he smirked, "Sorry just that's funny as shit. ~ S.L. Walker

Her father said, "You know, my dears, the world has been abnormal for so long that we've forgotten what it's like to live in a peaceful and reasonable climate. If there is to be any peace or reason, we have to create it in our own hearts and homes." "Even at a time like this?" Meg asked. The call from Calvin, the sound of her husband's voice, had nearly broken her control. "Especially at a time like this," her mother said gently. ~ Madeleine L'Engle

A bit of theory as we settle down for lunch: the waiter's treatment of Kitty is actually a kind of sandwich, with the bottom bread being the bored and slightly effete way he normally acts with customers, the middle being the crazed and abnormal way he feels around this famous nineteen-year-old girl, and the top bread being his attempt to contain and conceal this alien middle layer with some mode of behavior that at least approximates the bottom layer of boredom and effeteness that is his norm. ~ Jennifer Egan

Living is abnormal. ~ Eugene Ionesco

The abnormal, the sick, the vicious have become more and more interwoven into the violent culture of the United States. Into the way news is seen, into the way movies are seen. ~ Assata Shakur

I had choosen the path of the black sheep rather than that of the unicorns and puppies. ~ Magenta Periwinkle

She always says she dislikes the abnormal, it is so obvious. She says the normal is so much more simply complicated and interesting. ~ Gertrude Stein

...What I have denied and what my reason compels me to deny, is the existence of a Being throned above us as a god, directing our mundane affairs in detail, regarding us as individuals, punishing us, rewarding us as human judges might.

When the churches learn to take this rational view of things, when they become true schools of ethics and stop teaching fables, they will be more effective than they are to-day... If they would turn all that ability to teaching this one thing – the fact that honesty is best, that selfishness and lies of any sort must surely fail to produce happiness – they would accomplish actual things. Religious faiths and creeds have greatly hampered our development. They have absorbed and wasted some fine intellects. That creeds are getting to be less and less important to the average mind with every passing year is a good sign, I think, although I do not wish to talk about what is commonly called theology.

The criticisms which have been hurled at me have not worried me. A man cannot control his beliefs. If he is honest in his frank expression of them, that is all that can in justice be required of him. Professor Thomson and a thousand others do not in the least agree with me. His criticism of me, as I read it, charged that because I doubted the soul's immortality, or 'personality,' as he called it, my mind must be abnormal, 'pathological,' in other, words, diseased... I try to say exactly what I honestly believe to be the truth, and m ~ Thomas A. Edison

Indeed, so far from being humorous, the male American is the most abnormally serious creature who ever existed.. It is only fair to admit that he can exaggerate, but even his exaggeration has a rational basis. It is not founded on wit or fancy; it does not spring from any poetic imagination. ~ Oscar Wilde

Prayer is in essence rebellion - rebellion against the world in its fallenness. Prayer is the undying refusal to accept as normal what is pervasively abnormal. It is the refusal of every agenda, every scheme, every interpretation that is at odds with the norm as originally established by God. ~ David G. Wells

This was the first of the St. Augustines. Previous memos had borne messages from Zwingli, Lévi-Strauss, Rilke, Chekhov, Tillich, William Blake, Charles Olson and a Kiowa chief named Satanta. Naturally the person responsible for these messages became known throughout the company as the Mad Memo-Writer. I never referred to him that way because it was much too obvious a name. I called him Trotsky. There was no special reason for choosing Trotsky; it just seemed to fit. I wondered if he was someone I knew. Everybody seemed to think he was probably a small grotesque man who had suffered many disappointments in life, who despised the vast impersonal structure of the network and who was employed in our forwarding department, the traditional repository for all sex offenders, mutants and vegetarians. They said he was most likely a foreigner who lived in a rooming house in Red Hook; he spent his nights reading an eight-volume treatise on abnormal psychology, in small type, and he told his grocer he had been a Talmudic scholar in the old country. This was the consensus and maybe it had a certain logic. But I found more satisfaction in believing that Trotsky was one of our top executives. He made eighty thousand dollars a year and stole paper clips from the office. ~ Don DeLillo

I was pretty socially awkward as a kid, which is a common thread among animators. You have this need to connect to the rest of the world, but as soon as you do you feel totally awkward and abnormal. And so to relate to the world, you sit and draw. ~ Pete Doctor

Abnormal professions attract two classes: those who are not good enough for ordinary bourgeois life and those who are too good for it. We are dregs and scum, sir: the dregs very filthy, the scum very superior. ~ George Bernard Shaw