Normality Quotes

There is a subconscious way of taking violence as a way of expression, as a normality, and it has a lot of effects in the youth in the way they absorb education and what they hope to get out of life. ~ Salma Hayek

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

History lessons remind us that the states in which we live, their institutions, even their laws, have come to us through conflict, often of the most bloodthirsty sort. Our daily diet of news brings us reports of the shedding of blood, often in regions quite close to our homelands, in circumstances that deny our conception of cultural normality altogether. We succeed, all the same, in consigning the lessons both of history and of reportage to a special and separate category of "otherness" which invalidate our expectations of how our own world will be tomorrow and the day after not at all. Our institutions and our laws, we tell ourselves, have set the human potentiality for violence about with such restraints that violence in everyday life will be punished as criminal by our laws, while its use by our institutions of state will take the particular form of "civilised warfare. ~ Steven Pinker

There is no normality in life. Having two houses means that we can get out of each other's hair - which, let's face it, we've both got a lot of ~ Helena Bonham Carter

If you look at the whole life of the planet, we - you know, Man - has only been around for a few blinks of an eye. So if the infection wipes us all out, that is a return to normality. ~ Alex Garland

I suspect each of us uses the past to prop up the bruised present. It's a clumsy try for the comfort of normality. ~ Adib Khan

Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. ~ R.D. Laing

The classicist, and the naturalist who has much in common with him, refuse to see in the highest works of art anything but the exercise of judgement, sensibility, and skill. The romanticist cannot be satisfied with such a normal standard; for him art is essentially irrational - an experience beyond normality, sometimes destructive of normality, and at the very least evocative of that state of wonder which is the state of mind induced by the immediately inexplicable. ~ Herbert Read

Truth will keep on telling the truth
Lies will lie to be more uncouth
No more rainbow after the storm
Nowhere to escape leaving the norm ~ Munia Khan

Nothing would more quickly and definitively reduce U.S. income inequality than allowing every worker in all businesses to participate in deciding the range of incomes from one worker to another. They would never do what is nowadays a matter of normality: give one person millions, in some cases billions, while others have barely enough to make a living. ~ Richard D. Wolff

Individuality and creativity are slowly dampened by a normal job with normal people. ~ Fennel Hudson

I will always be a misfit,
The road paved through normality
will always bore a wild little spirit like me. ~ Nikki Rowe

Normality is a fine ideal for those who have no imagination. ~ Carl Jung

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

My darkest desires were for an inaccessible normality. ~ C.D. Reiss

Normal is not an opinion, it is a consensus. ~ Isabella Carter

Almost everyone prefers normality because normality brings comfort and security. But when you think about it, normality hinders the reason why you are on this earth. ~ Euginia Herlihy

You're his normality. You're a part of him, and he is a part of you. That's what makes this frightening, but that's what makes it right. ~ Becky Wicks

That's what art is: escaping everyday normality, which wants to eat you alive. ~ Stefano Benni

Then everything was normal again, except that the liner was speeding for the planet Krim at something more than thirty times the speed of light. Normality extended through all the galaxy so far inhabited by men. There were worlds on which there was peace, and worlds on which there was tumult. There were busy, zestful young worlds, and languid, weary old ones. From the Near Rim to the farthest of occupied systems, planets circled their suns, and men lived on them, and every man took himself seriously and did not quite believe that the universe had existed before he was born or would long survive his loss. Time passed. Comets let out vast streamers like bridal veils and swept toward and around their suns. Some of them - one in ten thousand, or twenty - were possibly seen by human eyes. The liner bearing Hoddan sped through the void. In time it made a landfall on the Planet Krim. ~ Murray Leinster

Sometimes I think the people to feel the saddest for are people who are unable to connect with the profound - people such as my boring brother-in-law, a hearty type so concerned with normality and fitting in that he eliminates any possibility of uniqueness for himself and his own personality. I wonder if some day, when he is older, he will wake up and the deeper part of him will realize that he has never allowed himself to truly exist, and he will cry with regret and shame and grief. ~ Douglas Coupland

There are no mineral monsters. ~ Canguilhem

Normality may lie in being a selectively deaf self-righteous victim of your own cognitive dissonance...but then again...who wants to be an open minded but self-doubting fence-sitter paralyzed by internal conflict? life eh? ~ Tweedy Peanut

Don't go to men who are willing to kill themselves driving in circles looking for normality. ~ James Hunt

The best shows have a clear idea of what they want to achieve, where the performers have the ability to disrupt normality and engage directly with audiences of all ages. A company who can do just that (apparently effortlessly) is dotComedy. ~ Lyn Gardner

Bad news drives out good news. The irrational is more controversial than the rational. Concurrence can no longer compete with dissent. One minute of Eldridge Cleaver is worth ten minutes of Roy Wilkins. The labor crises settled at the negotiating table is nothing compared to the confrontation that results in a strike ... normality has become the nemesis of network news. ~ Spiro T. Agnew

There are four types: the cretin, the imbecile, the stupid and the mad. Normality is a balanced mixture of all four. ~ Umberto Eco

The cases described in this section (The Fear of Being) may seem extreme, but I have become convinced that they are not as uncommon as one would think. Beneath the seemingly rational exterior of our lives is a fear of insanity. We dare not question the values by which we live or rebel against the roles we play for fear of putting our sanity into doubt. We are like the inmates of a mental institution who must accept its inhumanity and insensitivity as caring and knowledgeableness if they hope to be regarded as sane enough to leave. The question who is sane and who is crazy was the theme of the novel One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. The question, what is sanity? was clearly asked in the play Equus.
The idea that much of what we do is insane and that if we want to be sane, we must let ourselves go crazy has been strongly advanced by R.D. Laing. In the preface to the Pelican edition of his book The Divided Self, Laing writes: "In the context of our present pervasive madness that we call normality, sanity, freedom, all of our frames of reference are ambiguous and equivocal." And in the same preface: "Thus I would wish to emphasize that our 'normal' 'adjusted' state is too often the abdication of ecstasy, the betrayal of our true potentialities; that many of us are only too successful in acquiring a false self to adapt to false realities."
Wilhelm Reich had a somewhat similar view of present-day human behavior. Thus Reich says, "Homo normalis blocks off entirely the perce ~ Alexander Lowen

Being a famous writer is a little like being a tall dwarf. You're on the edge of normality. ~ John Updike

Israel's rebirth as a nation after two thousand years is a freak phenomenon of history. But in all the branches of science the observation of freak phenomena yields important clues to general laws. Dwarf stars and human giants, radioactivity and parthenogenesis, prophets, maniacs and saints are all freaks which carry the conditions of normality to a pointed and profiled extreme. So does this race of eternal victims with its flayed skin and exposed nerves, which demonstrates, with the horrible precision of an anatomic atlas, a condition of man otherwise mercifully hidden from us. ~ Arthur Koestler

The anorexic body is held in the grip of will alone; its meaning is far from stable. What it says - 'Notice me, feed me, mother me' - is not what it means, for such attentions constitute an agonising test of that will, and also threaten to return the body to the dreaded 'normality' it has been such ecstasy to escape. ~ Rachel Cusk

Something had been taken away from him in the war, against his will, and he would never be the same. Years in labour camps, in mountains, in salt mines: only solitude was natural to him now. Some part of him was terminally tired. He was beyond intimacy. The pretence at normality, the weight of the past, the unreality of the days here had exhausted him. ~ Joan London

Since we are living in an open society with a space for tolerance and indulgence, we must monitor assiduously the permanent changes of habits and customs and the "normality barometer" should be determined and adjusted, time after time. ("On a doggy day") ~ Erik Pevernagie

Who wouldn't like to give up normal life? I mean, normal life, you know, is the second worst thing to death itself. I think normality is something that makes everything very static, and I try to make my days, my daily routines, as uneven and rich as possible. ~ Vik Muniz

Jack missed the normality of merely reading the paper. ~ Tom Clancy

I'm so far from everything. From normality. From light. From everything I want to be. ~ John Fowles

The Deleuzian philosopher Brian Massumi clearly formulated how today's capitalism has already overcome the logic of totalizing normality and adopts instead a logic of erratic excess: the more varied, and even erratic, the better. Normalcy starts to lose its hold. The regularities start to loosen, This loosening of normalcy is part of capitalism's dynamic. It's not a simple liberation. It's capitalism's own form of power. It's no longer disciplinary institutional power that defines everything, it's capitalism's power to produce variety - because markets get saturated. Produce variety and you produce a niche market. The oddest of affective tendencies are okay - as long as they pay. (...) What happens next, when the system no longer excludes the excess, but directly posits it as its driving force - as is the case when capitalism can only reproduce itself through a continual self-revolutionizing, a constant overcoming of its own limits? Then one can no longer play the game of subverting the Order from the position of its part-of-no-part, since the Order has already internalized its own permanent subversion. ~ Slavoj Zizek

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

All he knew was that sometimes a man had to be grateful for normality, that a story could end less dramatically, and not half as badly as it might have done; that there was merit in an averted crisis, and that in finding his nephew Sidney had, at last, done something quietly responsible, without fuss or fanfare. Perhaps the rest of his life should be like this? he thought. It would involve a concentration on things close to the heart; a dedicated care of friends and family; a quieter existence, one that depended on listening harder and loving better; never resting in complacency; acknowledging faults, doubts and insecurities; the balance between solitude and company, the wish to escape and the need to come home: a loving attention. ~ James Runcie

Everyone has expectations of normality. I just accept that madness is my normality and struggling is madness. ~ Zachary Koukol

[Monty] talks about Fritz Perls and the Gestalt theory. The here and now is the only time that exists. And being yourself. Not accepting yourself, not taking yourself for granted. Being yourself. Your self. Monty defines 'normality' as a contententment with who you are. ~ Antony Sher

It is critical to note that our biases against the other are empowered less by our assumptions of their otherness and more by our assumptions about our own normality. ~ Jamie Arpin-Ricci

The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together. ~ Hannah Arendt

Don't pass on your passions, to settle in the stale normality. Endure. Strive. Ensure. ~ Anthony Liccione

Creativity, not normality, has become the paradigm of mental health. ~ Stephen Mitchell

But I was strong enough. I made it through the misery, until misery became normality. I find it ironic that when I finally became okay with the life I created inside 6E - that is when I ended up leaving it. ~ Alessandra Torre

Life is for living not for been stuck in a rut of complacency where normality consists of the mundane. ~ Steven Redhead

I've found constancy and balance between creativity and normality. ~ Julian Lennon

The judges of normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the social worker-judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is based; and each individual, wherever he may find himself, subjects to it his body, his gestures, his behavior, his aptitudes, his achievements. ~ Michel Foucault

I really am the world's shittiest boyfriend. Holding onto something normal for the sake of having it, for nothing other than to keep what is familiar and safe close to me because the alternative is so fucking terrifying I can't begin to wrap my head around it. It has nothing to do with it being another guy and everything to do with it being Chance, and Chance has the ability to shatter me into the minuscule fragments and base elements of the star I supposedly came from.
Who walks willingly into something like that? ~ Kelley York

Weird how I can feel so frail and tiny sometimes, and other times so brave and bold and reckless and free, and ... Does everybody feel the same? When people get grown-up, do they always feel grown-up and sensible and sorted out and ... And do I want to feel grown-up? Do I want to stop feeling ... paradoxical, nonsensical? Do I want to stop being crackers? Do I want to be destrangified? O yes, sometimes I want nothing more - but it only lasts a moment, then O I want to be the strangest and crakerest of everybody. ~ David Almond

This is what travelers discover: that when you sever the links of normality and its claims, when you break off from the quotidian, it is the teapots that truly shock. ~ Cynthia Ozick

There is no such thing as a normal period of history. Normality is a fiction of economic textbooks. ~ Joan Robinson

Throughout my entire life, I constantly tried to fight normality. I hate it. I hate the idea of it. I hate routine. I hate anything that feels remotely regular or right. ~ Tom Odell

Normality is an illusion, created by a conservative culture to control behaviour ~ Merlyn Gabriel Miller

The elegant jump from malicious gossip to compliment, seemed to me so very successful that I thought of adult normality precisely as an art of that type. ~ Elena Ferrante

Living is abnormal. ~ Eugene Ionesco

Normality is the Great Neurosis of civilization. ~ Tom Robbins

I should have moved to the forest long ago, I would think to myself, perhaps to the Black Forest although the place probably wasn't half as sequestered as I imagined, though no doubt there would be far fewer faces and voices, only the imperceptible cries of ants, the footsteps of spiders and the sound of trees growing. But the madness that remote places cultivate is not to be taken lightly and I've always found something particularly disquieting in madness left to quietly ferment on its own; the social functions required of us help us maintain, at the very last, an illusion of normality, and for that reason alone I had, until that point in my life, remained in the city. ~ Chloe Aridjis

When someone is going through a difficult time, the difficulties spread out in concentric circles and touch even peripheral situations and relationships. When darkness falls in one person, fire is lit in the other, and thereby all sense of normality vanishes, unless someone struggles to stay within it, without necessarily even realizing what one is doing. For on the one hand, everything is as usual, and it must remain as usual, on the other everything is an emergency. It is the friction between the two levels that starts the fire. ~ Karl Ove Knausgaard

Fear beyond rational limits forces people to cling to normality ~ Hiroya Oku

But I care, deeply. I find humans dull except in grief. There are very few in health, disaster, famine, atrocity, splendour or normality that interest me (interest ME!) but the motherless children do. Motherless children are pure crow. For a sentimental bird it is ripe, rich and delicious to raid such a nest. DAD ~ Max Porter

Nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us if the normal man does not amaze. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

Even in times of trauma, we try to maintain a sense of normality until we no longer can. That, my friends, is called surviving. Not healing. We never become whole again ... we are survivors. If you are here today ... you are a survivor. But those of us who have made it thru hell and are still standing? We bare a different name: warriors. ~ Lori Goodwin

As a consequence there are many people who become
neurotic because they are only normal, as there are
people who are neurotic because they cannot become
normal. For the former the very thought that you want
to educate them to normality is a nightmare; their
deepest need is really to be able to lead "abnormal"
lives. ~ C. G. Jung

Indeed, one of the functions of the structures of normality is that by making it unnecessary for almost everybody almost all the time to provide justifications for what they are doing or are about to do, they relieve us of what would otherwise be an intolerable burden. ~ Alasdair MacIntyre

I want you to be happy. I want to do my job so that you can move past this divorce and have a chance at normality. ~ Alessandra Torre

Normality wasn't normal. It couldn't be. If normality were normal, everybody could leave it alone. They could sit back and let normality manifest itself. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

Along the way I stopped into a coffee shop. All around me normal, everyday city types were going about their normal, everyday affairs. Lovers were whispering to each other, businessmen were poring over spread sheets, college kids were planning their next ski trip and discussing the new Police album. We could have been in any city in Japan. Transplant this coffee shop scene to Yokohama or Fukuoka and nothing would seem out of place. In spite of which
or, rather, all the more because
here I was, sitting in this coffee shop, drinking my coffee, feeling a desperate loneliness. I alone was the outsider. I had no place here.
Of course, by the same token, I couldn't really say I belonged to Tokyo and its coffee shops. But I had never felt this loneliness there. I could drink my coffee, read my book, pass the time of day without any special thought, all because I was part of the regular scenery. Here I had no ties to anyone. Fact is, I'd come to reclaim myself. ~ Haruki Murakami

normality is the thing one reaches once one has entered insanity. ~ Katelyn

Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly. ~ Charles Addams

Just because something is normal, does not make it morally justified. Case in point: Antisemitism in Nazi Germany. ~ BatWhaleDragon

When I was a teenager, I thought nothing would ever happen to me because my childhood was so normal. I had this complex of normality. ~ Audrey Tautou

Normality is way overrated. ~ Anna Jarzab

When I think of normality I think of mediocrity ~ Gillian Anderson

For her, normality - however messy - is far more comprehensible. ~ Sayaka Murata

It seems that nonsense is the only sensible recourse to remedy the nonsense of society's accepted normalcy ~ Natasha Tsakos

Dishtowels are the same as they always were. Sometimes these flashes of normality ~ Margaret Atwood

I wanted to reject it all because I was sick of being perfect. I was so bored with normality and dreams of poster boys and tabloid covers. ~ J. Merridew

I prefer not to starve, to live by the practice of medicine, which combines the best features of both science and philosophy with that imponderable and enlightening element, disease, unknown in its normality to either. But, like Pasteur, when he was young, or anyone else who has something to do, I wish I had more money for my literary experiments.
William Carlos Williams, c. 1931 ~ William Carlos Williams

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

They cultivated normality till it stood out of them all over in knobs, like the muscles upon professional strong men, and scarcely looked normal at all. And they talked interminably and loudly. From their bouncing mental health ordinary ill-balanced mortals shrank in alarm. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

According to Montaigne, it was the oppressive notion that we had complete mental control over our bodies, and the horror of departing from this portrait of normality, that had left the man unable to perform sexually. ~ Alain De Botton

There are those whose own vulgar normality is so apparent and stultifying that they strive to escape it. They affect flamboyant behavior and claim originality according to the fashionable eccentricities of their time. They claim brains or talent or indifference to mores in desperate attempts to deny their own mediocrity. These are frequently artists and performers, adventurers and wide-life devotees.
Then there are those who feel their own strangeness and are terrified by it. They struggle toward normalcy. They suffer to exactly that degree that they are unable to appear normal to others, or to convince themselves that their aberration does not exist. These are true freaks, who appear, almost always, conventional and dull. ~ Katherine Dunn

Green consumerism generally, and 'healthy' products and lifestyles in particular, contain quite precise notions about how an individual should consider his or her well-being. Not only is the market-place celebrated but an understanding of the 'natural body' itself becomes fetishised and idolised. Normality seems to have wholly dispensed with bodily illness and pain. Perfection is the norm, and one that can be gained through acquiring the correct products and perfecting the body. ~ Peter Dickens

Soon after Justine Sacco's shaming, I was talking with a friend, a journalist, who told me he had so many jokes, little observations, potentially risqué thoughts, that he wouldn't dare to post online anymore.

'I suddenly feel with social media like I'm tiptoeing around an unpredictable, angry, unbalanced parent who might strike out at any moment,' he said. 'It's horrible.'

He didn't want me to name him, he said, in case it sparked something off.

We see ourselves as nonconformist, but I think all of this is creating a more conformist, conservative age.

'Look!' we're saying. 'WE'RE normal! THIS is the average!'

We are defining the boundaries of normality by tearing apart the people outside of it. ~ Jon Ronson

Times like this, I don't wish for ignorance. I look around and I see the bloated ignorance of the lumpen proletariat: roly-poly, sausage-fingered, ginger-topped fathers of at least two illegitimate children trying to massage the asses of waiflike, peroxide-scarred students who are themselves trying to navigate adulthood with their new-found freedom from outdated parenting. ~ Ayize Jama-Everett

Desire for normality; a longing to adapt to some recognized and general rule; a wish to be like everyone else, from the moment that being different meant being guilty. ~ Alberto Moravia

We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can't cope with is therefore your own problem. ~ Douglas Adams

Yes, I remember the barbed wire and the guard towers and the machine guns, but they became part of my normal landscape. What would be abnormal in normal times became my normality in camp. ~ George Takei

Development never truly ends, as our brains evolved to evolve...we are adapted to adapt, to continually redefine normality, transforming ones space of possibility with new assumptions according to the continual process of trial and error ~ Beau Lotto

All around him, life carried on as usual on the American side of the river. The region was already seven years into the drug war, and it had all taken on a surreal normality. A block away from where he'd parked his squad car, people went about their shopping in the downtown stores, while Mexicans - some of them innocent bystanders - died in the city across the river. ~ Melissa Del Bosque

I am a woman. Every artist is a woman and should have a taste for other women. Artists who are homosexual cannot be true artists because they like men, and since they themselves are women they are reverting to normality. ~ Pablo Picasso

It all adds up to normality. ~ Greg Egan

… when Michel came home from school, for example, and everything was as it should be. My own voice, above all, asking him what he wanted in his sandwich, also sounded as it should have. The larder was full, I had done all of the shopping that morning. I took care of myself as well, I looked in the mirror before leaving the house: I made sure my clothes were clean, that I had shaved, that my hair didn't look like the hair of someone who never looks in a mirror - the people in the supermarket would have noticed nothing unusual, I was no divorced father reeking of alcohol, no father who couldn't handle things. I clearly remembered the goal I had set for myself: I wanted to keep up the appearance of normality. As far as possible, everything had to remain the same for Michel as long as his mother wasn't around. A hot meal every day, for a start. But also in other aspects of our temporary single-parent family, there shouldn't be too many visible changes. Normally, it wasn't my habit to shave every day; I didn't mind walking around with stubble. Claire had never made a big deal out of that either, but during those weeks I shaved every morning. I felt that my son had a right to sit at the table with a clean-smelling, freshly shaven father. A freshly shaven and clean-smelling father would not prompt him to think the wrong things, would in any case not cause him to doubt the temporary character of our single-parent family. ~ Herman Koch

Normality is death. ~ Theodor Adorno

It is madness. And if you don't know who you are, or if your real self has drifted away from you with the undertow, madness at least gives you an identity. It's the same with self-loathing. You're probably just normal and normal-looking but that's not a real identity, not the way ugliness is. Normality, just accepting that you're probably normal-looking, lacks the force field of self-disgust. If you don't know who you are, madness gives you something to believe in. ~ Emma Forrest

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

Normality is the new eccentric. ~ Criss Jami

I was not descending in a plane, coming Home.
I was watching an alien world as it ascended towards me - and one that I could never begin the process of readjusting to, because I knew that I would just as soon be returning to another world, whose normality was as alien to this home as I now was. ~ Jake Wood