Quotes & Sayings About Normality

Normality is way overrated. — Anna Jarzab

Every region should retain representative samples of its original or wilderness condition, to serve science as a sample of normality. Just as doctors must study healthy people to understand disease, so must the land sciences study the wilderness to understand disorders of the land-mechanism. — Aldo Leopold

He is, or has been, in many ways a great man. But for this very reason he is odd. It is only petty men who seem normal. — Umberto Eco

It all adds up to normality. — Greg Egan

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

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

Most journalists are restless voyeurs who see the warts on the world, the imperfections in people and places ... gloom is their game, the spectacle their passion, normality their nemesis. — Gay Talese

[T]hat state, love, is so utterly alien to that other idea without which we cannot live as human beings
the idea of justice. It is only because love is so profoundly the enemy of justice that our minds, shrinking in horor from its true nature, try to tame it by uniting it with its opposite [ ... ] in the hope that if we apply all the metaphors of normality, that if we heap them high enough, we shall, in the end, be able to approximate that state metaphorically. — Amitav Ghosh

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

Without deviance from normality, there can be no progress. — Frank Zappa

One egg, one embryo, one adult - normality. But a bokanovskified egg will bud, will proliferate, will divide. From eight to ninety-six buds, and every bud will grow into a perfectly formed embryo, and every embryo into a full-sized adult. Making ninety-six human beings grow where one grew before. Progress. — Aldous Huxley

Out of the 6.8 billion people in the world, these girls wanted their lives to end, wanted negative things to happen to them. In my world, that wasn't normal. I probably wasn't normal in their world, either. — Jessamine Verzosa

In the context of our present pervasive madness that we call normality, sanity, freedom, all our frames of reference are ambiguous and equivocal. — R.D. Laing

Normality is the ability to learn by experience, to be flexible, and to adapt to a changing environment. — Lawrence S. Kubie

Love brings the high and concealed characteristics of the lover into the light
what is rare and exceptional in him: to that extent it easily deceives regarding his normality. — Friedrich Nietzsche

There are a lot of factors in the life of an F1 driver which can combine to make you believe that you are somehow above normality. I think that is a mistake to start believing that. But, at the same time, it is important to be confident. — Damon Hill

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

There are no norms. All people are exceptions to a rule that doesn't exist. — Fernando Pessoa

Do soldiers feel this, when they get back from a war? The utter weirdness of utter normality. — David Mitchell

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

Normality wasn't in the days I'd left behind me: it was only to be found in whatever fortune placed in my path each morning. — Maria Duenas

The idea of one's normality is delusional fact of the reality. — J. Limbu

You're a strange kind of boy," said Achilles. "I was not tested for normality before I was entrusted with this mission," said Suriyawong. "But I have no doubt that I would fail such a test. — Orson Scott Card

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

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

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

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

The only people we can think of as normal are those we don't yet know very well. — Alain De Botton

One has never said better how much "humanism", "normality", "quality of life" were nothing but the vicissitudes of profitability. — Jean Baudrillard

Neighborhood folk still came, in small vanquished numbers and mostly in the afternoon, before the two small dining rooms and the bar were taken over by the educated classes, an ill-dressed, underfed, overdrunken group of squatters with minds so highly developed that they were excused from good manners, tastes so refined in one direction that they were excused for having none in any other, emotions so cultivated that the only aberration was normality, all afloat here on sodden pools of depravity calculated only to manifest the pricelessness of what they were throwing away, the three sexes in two colors, a group of people all mentally and physically the wrong size. — William Gaddis

The great thing about my two lives is I love them both. I'm very ambitious and nothing gets in the way of me practising and concentrating on winning golf tournaments. But then I come home and get back to normality. — Rory McIlroy

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

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

Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labour, its authorities of surveillance and registration, its experts in normality, who continue and multiply the functions of the judge, should have become the modern instrument of penality? Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons? — 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

I suggest we bring some normality back to this country and say if you are carrying a knife, there must be zero tolerance. If it was up to me, everyone caught with a knife would get an automatic ten year sentence. — Simon Cowell

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

Normality is the Great Neurosis of civilization. — Tom Robbins

We sense that 'normal' isn't coming back, that we are being born into a new normal: a new kind of society, a new relationship to the earth, a new experience of being human. — Charles Eisenstein

Equally serious is the complaint that psychoanalysis as a medical practice is a form of oppressive social control, labelling individuals and forcing them to conform to arbitrary definitions of 'normality'. This charge is in fact more usually aimed against psychiatric medicine as a whole: as far as Freud's own views on 'normality' are concerned, the accusation is largely misdirected. Freud's work showed, scandalously, just how 'plastic' and variable in its choice of objects libido really is, how so-called sexual perversions form part of what passes as normal sexuality, and how heterosexuality is by no means a natural or self-evident fact. It is true that Freudian psychoanalysis does usually work with some concept of a sexual 'norm'; but this is in no sense given by Nature. — Terry Eagleton

It seemed that other people's "normality" was the road to my insanity — Tony Attwood

The trick is the paradox - turning your story inside out. Now if it is something that appears to be of total normality and then suddenly turns inside out and is a different thing all together then that's fun to write. — Nigel Kneale

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

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

We have a name for the sum of grievances and compromises, this sheer normality of life lived among other people. We call it civilization. Culture, society, the workaday interactions of ordinary time. — Joseph Bottum

Some magic is normality you're not yet used to. — David Mitchell

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

A cup of tea would restore my normality.
[Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Screenplay] — Douglas Adams

The media chooses to portray the most extreme and violent aspects of a place. I do the opposite and portray the normality. — Brandon Stanton

I felt permanently exiled from 'normality.' Whether imposed by self or society, this outsider status - and not the disability itself - constitutes the most daunting barrier for most people with physical impairments, because it, even more than flights of steps or elevators without braille, prevents them from participating fully in the ordinary world, where most of life's satisfactions dwell. — Nancy Mairs

Normality is to be different. Every person is a different person. And one day you need to be aware of your difference. Aware that you are not the same as the others. That is to be normal. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

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

I am content, in these four walls, without normality. Lonely? Yes. Miserable? At times. But that is what being content is. Comfortable enough with the situation not to prompt change. — Alessandra Torre

One can't be a killer every moment of one's life. Some humanity is going to show itself now and then, some hunger for normality, no matter what you do. — Anne Rice

To be entranced, to be driven, to be obsessed, to be under the spell of an emerging, not quite fully 'comprehended' narrative
this is the greatest happiness of the writer's life even as it burns us out and exhausts us, unfitting us for the placid contours of 'normality. — Joyce Carol Oates

Sometimes these flashes of normality come at me from the side, like ambushes. The ordinary, the usual, a reminder, like a kick. — Margaret Atwood

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

As a runner on a film, you are the lowest of the low, and yet you have incredible access to everyone. I can totally imagine that for actors in the middle of a Hollywood bubble, all they really want is a sense of normality, and that gopher can be a tap for that. — Eddie Redmayne

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

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

We are in a world that is quite extremist and extremism makes more noise. Normality does not sell. — Vicente Del Bosque

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

When had I started believing in "normal," anyway? — Alexandra Bracken

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

Normality is what weak people call living, I call it death — Greg Plitt

Between normality and madness, which are basically the same thing, there exists an intermediary stage: it is called "being different." And people were becoming more and more afraid of "being different. — Paulo Coelho

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

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

The normality of the house terrified her: the gleaming surfaces, the tidiness, the homey touches, the sense that a person lived here who might walk in daylight on any street and pass for human in spite of the atrocities that he had committed. — Dean Koontz

We need to strive for more than normality because normality brings lack of fruitfulness, lack of growth, lack of increase and lack of success. — Euginia Herlihy

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

She disinterred the wickedness in normality, cataloguing the ways conformity and repression tip into psychosis, persecution, and paranoia, into cruelty and its masochistic, injury-cherishing twin. Like — Shirley Jackson

Normal is the greatest enemy with regard to creating the new. And the way of getting around this is you have to understand normal not as reality, but just a construct. And a way to do that, for example, is just travel to a lot of different countries and you'll find a thousand different ways of thinking the world is real, all of which are just stories inside of people's heads. That's what we are too. Normal is just a construct, and to the extent that you can see normal as a construct in yourself, you have freed yourself from the constraints of thinking this is the way the world is. Because it isn't. This is the way we are. — Alan Kay

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

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

[ ... ] extremes - whether good or bad - don't fit into society's definition of normality — Marilyn Manson

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

I have come to believe that we steer our individual spheres of being through the spectra of possible worlds via the choices we make, the acts we perform. Most people stick to known routes, and therefore cannot travel far. They live too modestly, and perhaps too privately. Only by being strange can we move, for strange acts cause us to be rejected by whatever normality we have offended, and to be propelled towards a normality that can better accommodate us. — K.J. Bishop

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

There are no mineral monsters. — Canguilhem

We are now cruising at a level of two to the power of twenty-five thousand to one against and falling, and we will be restoring normality just as soon as we are sure what is normal anyway. — Douglas Adams

The chaos and the confusion of all possible outcomes penetrated every pixel of computer generated light, and the waves of all sub-existential normality flooded by, creating an atmosphere of peaceful eventuality. I felt that a gradual restoration was in place, and that piece by piece, universes were being reformed and restored. — Joel Julian

And normality was precisely the most fearful part of that infinite war: nothing ever happened. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

She had drawn strength from everyone else's weakness, hoping that her adrenaline-fueled bravery would carry her safely back to normality, — Robert Galbraith

That last phrase, 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. I had something to learn. — Elena Ferrante

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

This is what we have all come to Cannes for: for something different, experimental, a tilting at windmills, a great big pole-vault over the barrier of normality by someone who feels that the possibilities of cinema have not been exhausted by conventional realist drama. — Peter Bradshaw

[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

One day I'm a normal person with a normal life," he said. "The next I'm standing on a street corner in Madrid with a secret phone and a hole in my arm and I'm bleeding all over, hoping I don't get arrested. It was completely crazy. But it seemed like the only way at the time. — Tyler Hamilton

There's something in us that lives just beyond our normality - and I think we've all got a song in us. If only we could master that tiny muscle and make it sound listenable. — Tamsin Greig

Do you want me because you love me or because I provide you normality drag? — Thomm Quackenbush

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

Solitude, which is held to be cause of eccentricity, in fact imposes excessive normality, and least in public ... [p. 7] — Shirley Hazzard

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

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

The hardest work most of us do is maintaining the appearance of normality. — Harry Shearer

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 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

The thoughts that arise because of 'depression' or 'elevation' are all wrong thoughts. The thoughts that arise in 'normality' are 'correct'. — Dada Bhagwan