Normality

"I wouldn't say I'm normal, but I'm relatively stable. When I think of normalcy I think of mediocrity and mediocrity scares the fuck out of me."

"There's no such thing as a normal child."

"Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal."

"America's present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration."

"My darling girl, when are you going to realize that being normal is not necessarily a virtue? It rather denotes a lack of courage."

"The note I wanted; that of the strange and sinister embroidered on the very type of the normal and easy."

"Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years."

"Normal is enormously susceptible to swinging with the gusts of politics and history. Disguised as scientific and fixed, it is subjective and protean. That is why I used the word normative above, a term derived from statistics, simply meaning what most people do."

"If, as psychologists, we follow the analogy of the other biological sciences, we must expect to find normalcy synonymous with maximal efficiency of function. Survival of the fittest means survival of those members of a species whose organisms most successfully resist the encroachments of environmental antagonists, and continue to function with the greatest internal harmony. In the field of emotions, then, why would we alter this expectation? Why should we seek the spectacularly disharmonious emotions, the feelings that reveal a crushing of ourselves by environment, and consider these affective responses as our normal emotions?"

"The Normal is the good smile in a child's eyes - all right. It is also the dead stare in a million adults."

"Don't become a well-rounded person. Well rounded people are smooth and dull. Become a thoroughly spiky person. Grow spikes from every angle. Stick in their throats like a pufferfish."

"What is abnormal is that I am normal. That I survived the Holocaust and went on to love beautiful girls, to talk, to write, to have toast and tea and live my life — that is what is abnormal."