Abnormal Quotes - Page 3

• Mob law is the most forcible expression of an abnormal public opinion; it shows that society is rotten to the core.

  Timothy Thomas Fortune

  Expression, Law, Public Opinion

  Timothy Thomas Fortune, Seth Moglen (2007). “Black and White: Land, Labor, and Politics in the South”, Simon and Schuster

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• Indeed, so far from being humorous, the male American is the most abnormally serious creature who ever existed.. It is only fair to admit that he can exaggerate, but even his exaggeration has a rational basis. It is not founded on wit or fancy; it does not spring from any poetic imagination.

  Oscar Wilde

  Spring, Humorous, Imagination

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• 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.

  Elie Wiesel

  Beautiful, Girl, Writing

  Interview with Oprah Winfrey, www.oprah.com. November, 2000.

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• I should love to do a novel, about one abnormal character seeing present-day life, very ordinary life, yet arresting through it, abnormality, until at the end the reader sees, and with little reluctance, that he is not abnormal at all, and that the main character might as well be himself.

  Patricia Highsmith

  Character, Ordinary, Littles

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• I was diagnosed with hypoglycemia, an abnormal decrease of sugar in the blood. Eventually I learned to eat five small meals a day. Now if I'm making a movie and get hungry, I call time out to eat some crackers

  Carol Alt

  Blood, Meals, Sugar

  "The Body Game". Interview with Elizabeth Sporkin, people.com. January 11, 1993.

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• The church is so subnormal that if it ever got back to the New Testament normal it would seem to people to be abnormal.

  Vance Havner

  People, Church, New Testament

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• Your Englishman, confronted by something abnormal will always pretend that it isn't there. If, however, you force him to look into it, he'll at once pretend that he sees the object not for what it is but for something that he would like it to be.

  James Agate

  Looks, Force, Englishmen

  October 14, 1932 entry in "Ego". Book by James Agate, 1935.

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• The supreme trick of mass insanity is that it persuades you that the only abnormal person is the one who refuses to join in the madness of others, the one who tries vainly to resist. We will never understand totalitarianism if we do not understand that people rarely have the strength to be uncommon.

  Eugene Ionesco

  People, Insanity, Trying

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• Not everything that steps out of line, and thus "abnormal", must necessarily be "inferior".

  Hans Asperger

  Autism, Lines, Aspergers

  "Neurotribes review - the evolution of our understanding of autism" by Saskia Baron, www.theguardian.com. August 23, 2015.

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• We have not yet made violence against women abnormal, extraordinary, unacceptable. We have not yet come to see it as a pathological issue.

  Eve Ensler

  Issues, Violence, Made

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• The most frightening thing in the world is to discover the abnormal in that which is closest to us.

  Kobo Abe

  World, Frightening, Closest

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• I despise my own hypersensitiveness, which requires so much reassurance. It is certainly abnormal to crave so much to be loved and understood.

  Anais Nin

  Reassurance, Despise, Understood

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• Testosterone Poisoning: … Until now it has been thought that the level of testosterone in men is normal simply because they have it. But if you consider how abnormal their behavior is, then you are led to the hypothesis that almost all men are suffering from ‘testosterone poisoning.’

  Alan Alda

  Men, Suffering, Levels

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• A bit of theory as we settle down for lunch: the waiter's treatment of Kitty is actually a kind of sandwich, with the bottom bread being the bored and slightly effete way he normally acts with customers, the middle being the crazed and abnormal way he feels around this famous nineteen-year-old girl, and the top bread being his attempt to contain and conceal this alien middle layer with some mode of behavior that at least approximates the bottom layer of boredom and effeteness that is his norm.

  Jennifer Egan

  Girl, Years, Lunch

  Jennifer Egan (2010). “A Visit from the Goon Squad”, p.128, Anchor

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• Relate comic things in pompous fashion. Irregularity, in other words the unexpected, the surprising, the astonishing, are essential to and characteristic of beauty. Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony. The blend of the grotesque and the tragic are attractive to the mind, as is discord to blasé ears. Imagine a canvas for a lyrical, magical farce, for a pantomime, and translate it into a serious novel. Drown the whole thing in an abnormal, dreamy atmosphere, in the atmosphere of great days … the region of pure poetry.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Fashion, Two, Mind

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• Evil always wins through the strength of its splendid dupes; and there has in all ages been a disastrous alliance between abnormal innocence and abnormal sin.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Winning, Evil, Age

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• May I never, I say, become that abnormal, merciless animal, that deformed monstrosity - a virtuous woman.

  Mary MacLane

  Animal, May, Virtuous Woman

  Mary MacLane (2014). “Tender Darkness: A Mary MacLane Sampler”, p.38, Petrarca Press

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• None in this age will amass wealth except those having five traits ofcharacter. High hopes; abnormal greediness; excessive miserliness, lack of fearing Allaah; and forgetfulness of the coming world.

  Sufyan al-Thawri

  Wisdom, Islamic, Age

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• The single-player game is a strange mutant monster which has only existed for 21 years and is about to go away because it is unnatural and abnormal.

  Raph Koster

  Player, Years, Games

  "The Next Wave, #17" By Chris Kohler, www.ign.com. February 21, 2006.

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• Most of us live in a condition of secrecy: secret desires, secret appetites, secret hatreds and relationship with the institutions which is extremely intense and uncomfortable. These are, to me, a part of the ordinary human condition. So I don't think I'm writing about abnormal things. ... Artists, in my experience, have very little center. They fake. They are not the real thing. They are spies. I am no exception.

  John le Carre

  Real, Writing, Artist

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• That is why he appears to us who are deeply life-hypnotized, obsessed about being alive in any way, as life-negating. To us, just to be alive seems to be the end. We are so much afraid of death that Buddha appears in love with death, and that looks abnormal. He seems to be suicidal. This is what many have criticized Buddha for.

  Rajneesh

  Death, Suicidal, Way

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• I was really careful in making monsters faint rather than die. I think that young people playing games have an abnormal concept about dying. They start to lose and say, ‘I’m dying.’ It’s not right for kids to think about a concept of death that way. They need to treat death with more respect.

  Satoshi Tajiri

  Kids, Thinking, Games

  "The Ultimate Game Freak". The TIME Magazine Interview, content.time.com. November 22, 1999.

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• I'm inclined to reserve all judgement, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Grief, College, Men

  F. Scott Fitzgerald (2002). “F. Scott Fitzgerald: Trimalchio: An Early Version of 'The Great Gatsby'”, p.5, Cambridge University Press

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• Was I insane? Maybe. But then, there were many different kinds of insanity. Aunt Rose had always taken for granted that the whole world was in a state of constantly fluctuating madness, and that a neurosis was not an illness, but a fact of life, like pimples. Some have more, some have less, but only truly abnormal people have none at all. This commonsense philosophy had consoled me many times before, and it did now, too.

  Anne Fortier

  Philosophy, Taken, Aunt

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• Fury is an entirely appropriate response to a system that sends young people to kill other young people in a war that never should have been waged. Yet the American Right is forever trying to pathologise anger as something menacing and abnormal, dismissing war opponents as hateful and, in the latest slur, "wild-eyed". This is much harder to do when victims of wars begin to speak for themselves: no one questions the wildness in the eyes of a mother or father who has just lost a son or daughter, or the fury of a soldier who knows that he is being asked to kill, and to die, needlessly.

  Naomi Klein

  Daughter, Mother, Father

  "The grieving parents who might yet bring Bush down". www.theguardian.com. July 10, 2004.

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