Normalcy Quotes

“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.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Any planet is 'Earth' to those that live on it.”
― Isaac Asimov, Pebble in the Sky

“I guess I should have reacted the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn't get myself to react. I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Civilised life, you know, is based on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly. The trouble is we forget after a while that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked when reality is torn down around us.”
― J.G. Ballard

“There's a notion I'd like to see buried: the ordinary person. Ridiculous. There is no ordinary person.”
― Alan Moore, Watchmen

“No one's family is normal. Normalcy is a lie invented by advertising agencies to make the rest of us feel inferior.”
― Claire LaZebnik, Epic Fail

“Our lives are mere flashes of light in an infinitely empty universe. In 12 years of education the most important lesson I have learned is that what we see as “normal” living is truly a travesty of our potential. In a society so governed by superficiality, appearances, and petty economics, dreams are more real than anything anything in the “real world”. Refuse normalcy. Beauty is everywhere, love is endless, and joy bleeds from our everyday existence. Embrace it. I love all of you, all my friends, family, and community. I am ceaselessly grateful from the bottom of my heart for everyone. The only thing I can ask of you is to stay free of materialism. Remember that every day contains a universe of potential; exhaust it. Live and love so immensely that when death comes there is nothing left for him to take. Wealth is love, music, sports, learning, family and freedom. Above all, stay gold.”
― Dominic Owen Mallary

“We're all pretty bizarre. Some of us are just better at hiding it, that's all.”
― John Hughes, The Breakfast Club

“The majority of people have successfully alienated themselves from change; they tediously arrange their lives into a familiar pattern, they give themselves to normalcy, they are proud if they are able to follow in auspicious footsteps set before them, they take pride in always coloring inside the lines and they feel secure if they belong to a batch of others who are like them. Now, if familiar patterns bore you, if normalcy passes before you unnoticed, if you want to create your own footsteps in the earth and leave your own handprints on the skies, if you are the one who doesn't mind the lines in the coloring book as much as others do, and perchance you do not cling to a flock for you to identify with, then you must be ready for adversity. If you are something extraordinary, you are going to always shock others and while they go about existing in their mundaneness which they call success, you're going to be flying around crazy in their skies and that scares them. People are afraid of change, afraid of being different, afraid of doing things and thinking things that aren't a part of their checkerboard game of a life. They only know the pieces and the moves in their games, and that's it. You're always going to find them in the place that you think you're going to find them in, and every time they think about you, you're going to give them a heart attack.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“[O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“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.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Masks of the Illuminati

“It might seem odd that in cities teetering at the edge of the abyss young people still go to class—in this case an evening class on corporate identity and product branding—but that is the way of things, with cities as with life, for one moment we are pottering about our errands as usual and the next we are dying, and our eternally impending ending does not put a stop to our transient beginnings and middles until the instant when it does.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Exit West

“I don't know if they're really like everybody else, or if they're able to pretend they are.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time

“You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“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.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“My whole life I wanted to be normal. Everybody knows there's no such thing as normal. There is no black-and-white definition of normal. Normal is subjective. There's only messy, inconsistant, silly, hopeful version of how we feel most at home in our own lives. But when I think about what I have, what I strived to reach my whole life, it's not the biggest or best or easiest or prettiest or most anything. It's not the Manor or the laundry closet. Not the multi-million dollar inheritance or the poorhouse. It's not superstardom or unemployment. It's family and love and safety. It's bravery and hope. It's work and laughter and imperfection. It's my normal.”
― Tori Spelling

“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.”
― Nnedi Okorafor, Who Fears Death

“I thought that if I did normal things—held down a job, for example—I could starve off the part of me that hated everything. If I had been a man, I may have turned to a life of crime.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“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.”
― Andrena Sawyer

“Normal is the Holy Grail
and only those without it
know its value.”
― Sarah Crossan, One

“I'm sorry I was short with him--but I don't like a man to approach me telling me it for my sake.
"Maybe it was," said Wylie
"It's poor technique."
"I'd all for it," said Wylie. "I'm vain as a woman. If anybody pretends to be interested in me, I'll ask for more. I like advice."
Stahr shook his head distastefully. Wylie kept on ribbing him--he was one of those to whom this privilege was permitted. "You fall for some kinds of flattery," he said. "this 'little Napoleon stuff.'"
"It makes me sick," said Stahr, "but it's not as bad as some man trying to help you."
"If you don't like advice, why do you pay me?"
"That's a question of merchandise," said Stahr. "I'm a merchant. I want to buy what's in your mind."
"You're no merchant," said Wylie. "I knew a lot of them when I was a publicity man, and I agree with Charles Francis Adams."
"What did he say?"
"He knew them all--Gould, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Astor--and he said there wasn't one he'd care to meet again in the hereafter. Well--they haven't improved since then, and that's why I say you're no merchant."
"Adams was probably a sourbelly," said Stahr. "He wanted to be head man himself, but he didn't have the judgement or else the character."
"He had brains," said Wylie rather tartly.
"It takes more than brains. You writers and artists poop out and get all mixed up, and somebody has to come in and straighten you out." He shrugged his shoulders. "You seem to take things so personally, hating people and worshipping them--always thinking people are so important-especially yourselves. You just ask to be kicked around. I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it--on the inside.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon

“The norms were created by somebody, and each of us is somebody. We can make our own normal.”
― Glennon Doyle, Untamed: Stop Pleasing, Start Living / A Toolkit for Modern Life

“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.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Normal' ist zunächst, was zwei Leute dafür halten.”
― Andrea Brackmann, Jenseits der Norm - hochbegabt und hoch sensibel?

“Normalcy was declared. (Normalcy was always a declaration.)”
― Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

“Were they normal? What a question to ask! And it is always those who know nothing about human nature, who are bored by psychology and shocked by physiology, who ask it.”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“If it had been that simple all along, I thought, I wish she'd given me clear instructions before, then I wouldn't have had to go to such lengths to find out how to be normal.”
― Sayaka Murata, Convenience Store Woman

“Madness and sanity are judged by majority norms.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Alien Clay

“While we had thought going home meant going back to a normal life, we had quickly realized there was no normal. Maybe, even, there was no home.”
― Karie Fugett, Alive Day: A Memoir

“How disappointing that we live in a society where a child is either completely 'normal' --as in, they can fit into this oddly designed box that no one in particular created but that society has deemed to be the only way--or there's something entirely, utterly, absolutely wrong with them.”
― Chloé Hayden, Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After