Abnormality Quotes

She is so beautiful she is unnatural; her beauty is an abnormality, a deformity, for none of her features exhibit any of those touching imperfections that reconcile us to the imperfection of the human condition. ~ Angela Carter

... ongoing care for the soul rather than seek for a cure appreciates the mystery of human suffering and does not offer the illusion of a problem-free life.
I sees every fall into ignorance and confusion as an opportunity to discover that the beast residing at the center of the labyrinth is also an angel.
To approach this paradoxial point of tension where adjustment and abnormality meet is to move closer to the realization of our mystery-filled, star-born nature.
It is a beast this thing that stirs in the core of our being, but it is also the star of our innermost nature.
We have to care for this suffering with extreme reverence so that in our fear and anger at the beast, we do not overlock the star.
~Thomas Moore *Care of the Soul* ~ Thomas Moore

Perversion is considered a biological abnormality rather than a sin. These things are contrary to the teaching of God's Word. And God has not changed. His standards have not been lowered. God still calls immorality a sin and the Bible says God is going to judge it. ~ Billy Graham

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

Not to sleep during the night means to be aware every moment of your abnormality, and therefore I wait impatiently for morning and daylight, when I have the right not to sleep. ~ Anton Chekhov

We are all insane. But how do you distinguish sanity from insanity, how do you diagnose abnormality in this new world? ~ Francesca Lia Block

Diversity is not an abnormality but the very reality of our planet. The human world manifests the same reality and will not seek our permission to celebrate itself in the magnificence of its endless varieties. Civility is a sensible attribute in this kind of world we have; narrowness of heart and mind is not. ~ Chinua Achebe

Getting calcium from plants might seem a little strange in a society that is so focused on dairy foods as a source of calcium, but some research suggests that even omnivores get as much as 40 percent of their calcium from plant foods. While a strong dairy lobby has convinced many consumers that milk and other dairy foods are essential for a healthy diet, the ability to drink milk into adulthood is not the norm throughout the world. Normal development throughout most of the world involves a gradual loss of the enzyme needed to digest milk sugar after children are weaned from breast milk. We refer to the lack of this enzyme as "lactose intolerance." But that's definitely a western bias since this "intolerance" is not a lack or an abnormality; it's part of normal human development in most people. ~ Jack Norris

At first my father's job was clearing ruins. He had filed a sharp protest, however, justifying his disability over ten pages of closely spaced handwriting, buttressed by statements from witnesses and discharge papers from clinics for nervous diseases. His arguments were irrefutable, particularly if we take into consideration--aside from the actual facts--his polemical tone and his brilliant style. 'I hereby state for the attention of the esteemed Commissarist,' he wrote in his appeal, 'in connection with Item A-2, in which I took the liberty of citing the causes of my total incapacity and proving--if in a very sensible fashion--my abnormality as well as my complete mental and physical worthlessness, the worthlessness of a neurotic and alcoholic incapable of taking care of his family or himself, I hereby state, therefore, with a view to the most specific information possible on this matter, although each and every one of the aforementioned matters is in itself a physical amputation, I am stating that I am also flat-footed, a certificate to which effect I am appending from the draft board at Zalaegerszeg, by which I am exempt from military service by virtue of 100 percent flat-footedness. . . ~ Danilo Kis

From what has been said, it would appear that the possibility of thyroid deficiency should be considered, and if found, should be treated in any woman with a menstrual abnormality or a reproductive problem. It was generally agree that correction of thyroid deficiency solved many such abnormalities and problems - until about 1940. ~ Broda Otto Barnes

I was born tall. I was awkward and gangly. Before that, I was a really chubby elementary school kid. I've always been sort of a physical abnormality. ~ Timothy Simons

It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself__anything that carried the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called. ~ George Orwell

What we see in this world is a gross abnormality. The human consciousness fails to perceive the very simple, divine nature of every atom in every moment. ~ Frederick Lenz

Dreams are associated with a state called REM sleep, the abbreviation standing for rapid eye movement. The REM state is strongly correlated with sexual arousal. Experiments have been performed in which sleeping subjects are awakened whenever REM state emerges, while members of a control group are awakened just as often each night but not when they're dreaming. After some days, the control group is a little groggy, but the experimental group - the ones who are prevented from dreaming - is hallucinating in daytime. It's not that a few people with a particular abnormality can be made to hallucinate in this way; anyone is capable of hallucinations. ~ Carl Sagan

One of my first reservations about Zionism was and is that, semiconsciously at least, it grants the anti-Semite's first premise about the abnormality of the Jew. ~ Christopher Hitchens

When once we have discovered how pain and suffering diminish the personality and how joy alone increases it, then the morbid attraction which is felt for evil, pain and abnormality will have lost its power. Why do we reward our men of genius, our suicides, our madmen and the generally maladjusted with the melancholy honours of a posthumous curiosity? Because we know that it is our society which has condemned these men to death and which is guilty because, out of its own ignorance and malformation, it has persecuted those who were potential saviours; smiters of the rock who might have touched the spring of healing and brought us back into harmony with ourselves. Somehow, then, and without going mad, we must learn from these madmen to reconcile fanaticism with serenity. Either one, taken alone, is disastrous, yet except through the integration of these two opposites there can be no great art and no profound happiness--and what else is worth having? For nothing can be accomplished without fanaticism and without serenity nothing can be enjoyed. ~ Cyril Connolly

The only abnormality is the incapacity to love. ~ Anais Nin

I see everything as if in a dark mirror, as if through smoked glass. I view the world in the same way as others look at the Sun in eclipse. Thus I see the Earth in eclipse. I see us moving about blindly in eternal Gloom, like the May bugs trapped in a box by a cruel child. It's easy to harm and injure us, to smash up our intricately assembled, bizarre existence. I interpret everything as abnormal, terrible and threatening. I see nothing but Catastrophes. But as the Fall is the beginning, can we possibly fall even lower? ~ Olga Tokarczuk

So I had to face the fact that I was blessed with abilities that were considered symptoms of emotional abnormality or mental derangement by psychology, often thought of as demonic by religion, and whose very existence was denied altogether by science. So in my darker moments I used to think that my psychic initiation and subsequent experiences were a mixed bag, to say the least. But the fact is that I was very sensitive to criticism for the very good reason that often I shared many of the beliefs that stimulated it. ~ Jane Roberts

Every day the material world mistreats me. My sensibility is like a flame in the wind. I walk down the street and I see in the faces of the passers-by, not their real expressions, but the expressions they would wear if they knew about my life and how I am, if the ridiculous, timid abnormality of my soul were made transparent in my gestures and in my face. In the eyes that avoid mine I suspect a mockery I find only natural, aimed at the inelegant exception I represent in a world that takes pleasure in things and in activity and, in the depths of these passing physiognomies, I imagine and interpose an awareness of the timid nature of my life that sparks off guffaws of laughter. After thinking this, I try in vain to convince myself that I alone am the source of this idea of other people's mockery and mild opprobrium. But once objectified in others, I can no longer reclaim the image of myself as a figure of fun. I feel myself grow suddenly vague and hesitant in a hothouse rife with ridicule and animosity. From the depths of their soul, everyone points a finger at me. Everyone who passes stones me with merry insolence. I walk amongst enemy ghosts that my sick imagination has conjured up and planted inside real people. Everything jabs and jeers at me. And sometimes, in the middle of the road - unobserved, after all - I stop and hesitate, seeking a sudden new dimension, a door onto the interior of space, onto the other side of space, where without delay I might flee my awareness of ~ Fernando Pessoa

Something she and her husband had in common but rarely discussed was the absence of a desire for children, to fill their home with people besides themselves. It was a silent agreement, felt rather than spoken, and in her experience the soundest agreements were the ones that did not require the reassurances of language. Therefore this line of questioning was the inverse of what she usually fielded, since a childless married woman in her thirties was so often regarded, by men and women alike, as a puzzle or a pity. What's the story here? people would ask, inquests designed to make women like her suspect there was something malformed inside, blinding them to the hideous reality of their choice. ~ Laura Van Den Berg

That many if not most people ... who want fresh leafy greens in January buy them at the supermarket after they've been bleached and plastic-bag shipped from California or beyond is not a tribute to modern technology; it's an unprecedented abdication of personal responsibility and a ubiquitous benchmark of abnormality. ~ Joel Salatin

The primary paradox of Christianity is that the ordinary condition of man is not his sane or sensible condition; that the normal itself is an abnormality. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

So what we can say is that freedom is the experience of abnormality as possibility, uttered in abstraction and compelled by strange-love that no law can underwrite. ~ Anonymous

Darwin's dice have rolled badly for Earth. The human species is, in a word, an environmental abnormality. Perhaps a law of evolution is that intelligence usually extinguishes itself. ~ E. O. Wilson

When people live in abnormality for too long, the abnormal becomes normal and eventually, identity is lost ~ Kudakwashe Mazendame

There was a muchacha who lived near my house. La gente del pueblo talked about her being una de las otras, "of the Others." They said that for six months she was a woman who had a vagina that bled once a month, and that for the other six months she was a man, had a penis and she peed standing up. they called her half and half, mita' y mita', neither one nor the other but a strange doubling, a deviation of nature that horrified, a work of nature inverted. But there is a magic aspect in abnormality and so-called deformity. Maimed, mad, and sexually different people were believed to posess supernatural powers by primal cultures' magico-religious thinking. For them, abnormality was the price a person had to pay for her or his inborn extraordinary gift.

There is something compelling about being both male and female, about having an entry into both worlds. Contrary to some psychiatric tenets, half and halfs are not suffering from a confusion of sexual identity, or even from a confusion of gender. What we are suffering from is an absolute despot duality that says we are able to be only one or the other. It claims that human nature is limited and cannot evolve into something better. But I, like other queer people, am two in one body, both male and female. I am the embodiment of the heiros gamos: the coming together of opposite qualities within. ~ Gloria E Anzaldua

The Spanish had butchered the Indians with a clean conscience because they were confident that they knew what a normal human being was. Their reason told them it was someone who wore breeches, had one wife, didn't eat spiders and slept in a bed. ~ Alain De Botton

The adjuration to be "normal" seems shockingly repellent to me; I see neither hope nor comfort in sinking to that low level. I think it is ignorance that makes people think of abnormality only with horror and allows them to remain undismayed at the proximity of "normal" to average and mediocre. For surely anyone who achieves anything is, essentially, abnormal. ~ Karl A. Menninger

The safe thing always is to run. To just assume you're too fucked up to do anything that remotely resembles normal. The good wife. The doting father. The safe thing to do is to be satisfied with being abnormal. To accept being fucked up. And to be alone in your abnormality and fucked-uppedness. To know that you are bad and alone and there's no fixing it or even wanting to. To not do the work. ~ Stacey May Fowles

An anomaly is not an abnormality. Diversity does not signify sickness. ~ Georges Canguilhem

I should love to do a novel, about one abnormal character seeing present-day life, very ordinary life, yet arresting through it, abnormality, until at the end the reader sees, and with little reluctance, that he is not abnormal at all, and that the main character might as well be himself. ~ Patricia Highsmith

Photography - the supreme form of travel, of tourism - is the principal modern means for enlarging the world. As a branch of art, photography's enterprise of world enlargement tends to specialize in the subjects felt to be challenging, transgressive. A photograph may be telling us: this too exists. And that. And that. (And it is all 'human.') But what are we to do with this knowledge - if indeed it is knowledge, about, say, the self, about abnormality, about ostracized or clandestine worlds? ~ Susan Sontag

And at times I murmured the token phrase to the doctor, 'When can I go home?' knowing that home was the place where I least desired to be. There they would watch me for signs of abnormality, like ferrets around a rabbit burrow waiting for the rabbit to appear. ~ Janet Frame

Is deviation from the locally approved norms always and everywhere to be taken as disease? ~ Bernard Wolfe

Nothing is more curious and awkward than the relationship of two people who only know each other with their eyes - who meet and observe each other daily, even hourly and who keep up the impression of disinterest either because of morals or because of a mental abnormality. Between them there is listlessness and pent-up curiosity, the hysteria of an unsatisfied, unnaturally suppressed need for communion and also a kind of tense respect. Because man loves and honors man as long as he is not able to judge him, and desire is a product of lacking knowledge. ~ Thomas Mann

I walk along a street and see in the faces of the passersby not the expression they really have but the expression they would have for me if they knew about my life and how I am, if I carried, transparent in my gestures and my face, the ridiculous, timid abnormality of my soul. ~ Fernando Pessoa

The study of abnormality is one of the main ways that power relations are established in society. When an abnormality and its corresponding norm are defined, somehow it is always the normal person who has the power over the abnormal.
The psychologist tells us about the madmen, the physician about the patients, the criminologist (or the legal theorist, or the politician) talks about the criminal, but we never expect to hear the latter talk about the former - what they have to say has already been ruled irrelevant, because by definition they have no knowledge (but that is code for not wanting them to have any power). ~ Lydia Alix Fillingham

Woman suffrage is an unjust, unreasonable, unspiritual abnormality. It is a hard, undigested, tasteless, devitalized proposition. It is a half-fledged, unmusical, Promethean abomination. It is a quack bolus to reduce masculinity even by the obliteration of femininity. ~ John Boyle O'Reilly

Disease is an abnormal state of the body which primarily and independently produces a disturbance in the normal functions of the body. It may be an abnormality of temperament or form (structure). Symptom is a manifestation of some abnormal state in the body. It may be harmful as a colic pain or harmless as the flushing of cheeks in peripneumonia. ~ Avicenna

Not everything that steps out of line, and thus "abnormal", must necessarily be "inferior". ~ Hans Asperger

I adore the absurd and the abnormal; therefore, that's what I write about. That's what I need to write about. The mainstream has never turned me on. ~ Gerri R. Gray

Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors. ~ George Santayana

The initial months of the war had left Barcelona plunged in a strange somnolence of fear and internal skirmishes. The fascist Rebellion had failed in Barcelona in the first few days after the coup, and there were those who wanted to believe that the war was now a distant event, that in the end it would be seen as just one more piece of bravado from generals with little stature and even less shame. In a matter of weeks, they said, everything would return to the feverish abnormality that characterize the countries public life . . . He knew that a civil war is never just one fight, but a tangle of large or small fights bound to one another. It's official memory is always established by chroniclers and trench on the winning or the losing side, but it is never the story of those who are trapped between the two, those who seldom set the bonfire alight...[He] used to say that in Spain and opponent may be scorned, but anyone who does things his own way and refuses to swallow what he doesn't agree with is hated. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon

I WILL NOT TOLERATE MENTION OF YOUR ABNORMALITY UNDER THIS ROOF! ~ J.K. Rowling

Homosexuality is against nature. Sexual expression is permitted only within marriage, between man and woman, male and female. Anything else is an abnormality and is against nature. ~ Pope Shenouda III

To live in Metropolis was to know that the exceptional was as commonplace as diet soda, that abnormality was the popcorn norm. ~ Salman Rushdie

Sexual normalcy and abnormality are personal and subjective concepts. What is unnatural to one [person] is natural to another. What is abnormal under certain conditions may be completely normal under others. And, in any event, to be different is not necessarily to be wrong, or to be sick. ~ Victor J. Banis

It takes a person of great care and insight to watch for any abnormality in the green grass even while it grows abundantly and healthily. ~ Kenzaburo Oe

If she is efficient and capable or ambitious, it is assumed that she has failed to find satisfaction as a normal woman, even to the extent of implying a glandular abnormality or sexual perversion. ~ Germaine Greer

To a sinner, a righteous person is an oddity and an abnormality. A Christian's goodness is a rebuke to the wicked; his being right-side up is a reflection upon the worldling's inverted position. ~ Billy Graham