Quotes about normalcy

As I've gotten older, I have taught myself to act "normal." I can do it well enough to fool the average person for a whole evening, maybe longer. But it all falls apart if I hear something that elicits a strong emotional reaction from me that is different from what people expect. In an instant, in their eyes, I turn into the sociopathic killer I was believed to be forty years ago.

[Jesus Christ] used to have blue eyes but I painted them brown like mine and everybody’s, to make him normal.

I thought that nothing enormously bad or good had happened to me during my life. All the normal things had occurred. I had lived a completely unremarkable life. I wanted only my home, and the love and safety of those around me, nothing else. I knew there was no particular reason why I was put on this earth, but here I was and I was glad to be here, awed by the beauty of it. It was a perfect moment. (p.99)

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

The world might be going up in flames, but we have to carry on as normal

Says you and your family. Sooner or later you’re gonna realize that just cause a Turner thinks a thing is normal doesn’t mean it is. Not at all.

At the beginning of that interval a type-machine was a curiosity. The person who owned one was a curiosity, too. But now it is the other way about: the person who doesn't own one is a curiosity.

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.

The normal is that which nobody quite is. If you listen to seemingly dull people very closely, you'll see that they're all mad in different and interesting ways, and are merely struggling to hide it.

I can be a stupid girl inside of a crazy woman at times over you. If I weren’t, you should be worried! We all do stupid shit. I might as well be a fool for someone worth it.

Insanity is nothing more than ordinary.

The ordinary lunatic is generally a harmless, isolated case; since everyone sees that something is wrong with him, he is quickly taken care of. But the unconscious infections of groups of so-called normal people are more subtle and far more dangerous.

I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.

As soon as Mr. Prosser realized that he was substantially the loser after all, it was as if a weight lifted itself off his shoulders: this was more like the world as he knew it.

To be something abnormal meant that you were to serve the normal. And if you refused, they hated you... and often the normal hated you even when you did serve them.

Landing on the shores of normalcy is wonderful, especially after being tossed around in the sea of sickness.

Yeah. She'd manipulated the second most powerful vampire in town into taking her side against a psycho bitch-queen sorority girl. She'd talked rationally about putting people's brains into computers. This was a normal day. No wonder she was screwed up.

And once again, work is providing us with a comforting sense of normalcy-living and working inside of coding's predictably segmented time/space. Simply grinding away at something makes life feel stable, even though the external particulars of life (like our pay checks, our office, and so forth) are, at best, random.

Stay in the middle of the bell-curve of social norms and follow along, or you will find out the about freedom you never had.

Normalcy was declared. (Normalcy was always a declaration.)

[O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.

It seems that nonsense is the only sensible recourse to remedy the nonsense of society’s accepted normalcy

I can't bring myself to watch yet another video, not because I don't care, but because we're all just a few videos away from becoming completely desensitized. The public execution of Black folks will never be normal.

If the history of the last century taught us the dangers of empowering governments to determine genetic “fitness” (i.e., which person fits within the triangle, and who lives outside it), then the question that confronts our current era is what happens when this power devolves to the individual. It is a question that requires us to balance the desires of the individual— to carve out a life of happiness and achievement, without undue suffering— with the desires of a society that, in the short term

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.

Believe it or not, a normal human being is one who can have an orgasm and is adjusted to his society.

No one's family is normal. Normalcy is a lie invented by advertising agencies to make the rest of us feel inferior.

My family was relatively normal: the kind of normal where my stepfather blamed everything on the Amish, and my older sister thought hibernation only existed in fairy tales.

I'm sick and tired of having a forest and a torture chamber in my house... I want to have a nice quiet flat with ordinary doors and windows and a wife inside it, like anybody else!

If you can't, or won't, think of Seymour, then you go right ahead and call in some ignorant psychoanalyst. You just do that. You just call in some analyst who's experienced in adjusting people to the joys of television, and Life magazine every Wednesday, and European travel, and the H-bomb, and Presidential elections, and the front page of the Times, and God knows what else that's gloriously normal.

No one was normal, not really.

Conventions are, indeed, all that shield us from the shivering void, though often they do so but poorly and desperately.

Her tragedy, if she had one, was to be as normal and average as any child ever born.

It’s horrible," she said.He looked at her in surprise. Horrible? Wasn’t that odd? He hadn’t thought that for years. For him the word “horror” had become obsolete. A surfeiting of terror made terror a cliché. To Robert Neville the situation merely existed as natural fact. It had no adjectives.

I could almost see fairies skipping on top of the snake-tongue flames—brief moments of clarity overcome by suffocating normalcy. It occurred to me that everything is believable during a glimpse, and it is during these flashes we see things as they truly are—unruly shadows in the corner of our perceptions. The only way to overcome is to act as Rachael did—as we all should—staring into the brightest light we can manage, until any hint of darkness is burned from our vision.