Quotes & Sayings About Abnormality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You're an abnormality. People get scared when they come across something that doesn't behave the way they expect it to. People like labels and categories and things that they can predict. When people can't explain something, they assume it's because there's something wrong with it. They try to fix it or change it. They mess with it until it's translatable and they bring it down to their level. Trying to change someone is easier than trying to accept them. It's how they were programmed — Katie Kacvinsky

In a land that knew only dark beauty, she was something of a hybrid no one dared touch. But the tall Arab did not appear in the least daunted by her abnormality. No, she saw his eyes. He was not daunted in the least. — V.S. Carnes

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

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

... 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

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

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

In the days of Columbus most medical practices were as much superstition as science. Because of infections, operations were not often performed, except for amputations under dire battlefield conditions. Most of the time these attempts to rectify an abnormality ended in disaster. Now things are different, with positive results being expected and are so frequent that people depend on elective surgery to enhance their lives. — Hank Bracker

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

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

Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created - nothing. That is because we are all queer fish, queerer behind our faces and voices than we want any one to know or than we know ourselves. When I hear a man proclaiming himself an "average, honest, open fellow," I feel pretty sure that he has some definite and perhaps terrible abnormality which he has agreed to conceal - and his protestation of being average and honest and open is his way of reminding himself of his misprision. — F Scott Fitzgerald

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

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

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

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

ALBINOS DEMAND ACTION ON MOVIE SLUR The albino community demanded action yesterday to stop their unfair depiction as yet another movie featured an albino as a deranged hitman. "We've had enough," said Mr. Silas yesterday at a small rally of albinos at London's Pinewood Studios. "Just because of an unusual genetic abnormality, Hollywood thinks it can portray us as dysfunctional social pariahs. Ask yourself this: Have you ever been, or know anyone who has ever been, a victim of albino crime?" The protest follows hot on the heels of last week's demonstrations when Colombians and men with ponytails complained of being unrelentingly portrayed as drug dealers. - Extract from The Mole, July 31, 2003 — Jasper Fforde

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

I know, Little Man, you are quick with the diagnosis of craziness when you meet a truth you don't like. And you feel yourself as the 'homo normalis'. You have locked up crazy people, and the normal people manage this world. Who then is to blame for all the misery? Not you, of course, you only do your duty, and who are you to have an opinion of your own? I know, you don't have to repeat it. It isn't you that matters, Little Man. But when I think of your newborn children, of how you torture them in order to make them into 'normal' human beings after your image. — Wilhelm Reich

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

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

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

I had a second trimester abortion. I was pregnant with a much-wanted child who was diagnosed with a genetic abnormality. I made a choice to terminate the pregnancy. It was my third pregnancy, and I was very obviously showing. More important, I could feel the baby move. — Ayelet Waldman

Looking at obesity without preconceived ideas, one would assume that the main trend of research should be directed toward an examination of abnormalities of the fat metabolism, since by definition excessive accumulation of fat is the underlying abnormality. It so happens that this is the least work has been done. — Hilde Bruch

I have an odd craving to whisper about those few frightful hours in that ill-rumoured and evilly shadowed seaport of death and blasphemous abnormality. — H.P. Lovecraft

But there was one mistake in this masquerade that revealed the supposed human spirit was literally blowing smoke: It took the form of a woman only from the waist up. That's typical of the demonic; they always give themselves away with some abnormality of appearance when they try to manifest themselves as human beings. — Ralph Sarchie

The norm is white, apparently, in the view of people who see things in that way. For them, the only reason you would introduce a black character is to introduce this kind of abnormality. Usually, it's because you're telling a story about racism or at least about race. — Octavia E. Butler

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maimed, mad, and sexually different people were believed to possess supernatural powers by primal cultures' magico-religious thinking. For them, abnormality was the price a person had to pay for her or his extraordinary gift. — Gloria E. Anzaldua

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I can't watch someone cook without helping. It's a genetic abnormality. — Jodi Picoult

And suddenly, lying in bed, I became aware of every inch of my body and I apologised to it, quietly. I apologised for bring so ungrateful for so long. Then I thanked my arms, hands and fingers for always trying so hard. I thanked my legs and feet for holding me up all the time. I thanked my brain for working so amazingly well and conjuring up thoughts and dreams and sentences and images and crazy poems. And I thanked all my organs for working together and giving me life. It had taken four and a half billion years for me to be here. Right now. In this universe. And in that moment, I felt totally overwhelmed at being alive. There could be nothing but there was everything. I didn't want to waste a single second more worrying about trivialities. Worrying that I'd never match up to an ideal that didn't even exist. Nobody is normal. We are all different. I had to make sure that every moment I had left on this planet counted. — Francesca Martinez

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

The starting point of Darwin's theory of evolution is precisely the existence of those differences between individual members of a race or species which morphologists for the most part rightly neglect. The first condition necessary, in order that any process of Natural Selection may begin among a race, or species, is the existence of differences among its members; and the first step in an enquiry into the possible effect of a selective process upon any character of a race must be an estimate of the frequency with which individuals, exhibiting any given degree of abnormality with respect to that, character, occur. The unit, with which such an enquiry must deal, is not an individual but a race, or a statistically representative sample of a race; and the result must take the form of a numerical statement, showing the relative frequency with which the various kinds of individuals composing the race occur. — Karl Pearson