normalcy

Some want, to be exempt. They do not want to excel, they do not want to exert. They want to be considered excellent, for desiring to be held exempt, from all accountability.

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!

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.

No one was normal, not really.

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.

I could almost see fairies skipping on top of the snake-tongue flames__rief 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__nruly shadows in the corner of our perceptions. The only way to overcome is to act as Rachael did__s we all should__taring into the brightest light we can manage, until any hint of darkness is burned from our vision.

It seems that nonsense is the only sensible recourse to remedy the nonsense of society__ accepted normalcy

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

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.

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.

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

If the history of the last century taught us the dangers of empowering governments to determine genetic __itness_ (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, may be interested only in driving down the burden of disease and the expense of disability. And operating silently in the background is a third set of actors: our genes themselves, which reproduce and create new variants oblivious of our desires and compulsions_ but, either directly or indirectly, acutely or obliquely, influence our desires and compulsions. Speaking at the Sorbonne in 1975, the cultural historian Michel Foucault once proposed that __ technology of abnormal individuals appears precisely when a regular network of knowledge and power has been established._ Foucault was thinking about a __egular network_ of humans. But it could just as easily be a network of genes.

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.

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

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.

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.

I can be a stupid girl inside of a crazy woman at times over you. If I weren__, you should be worried! We all do stupid shit. I might as well be a fool for someone worth it.