A Quote by Karl A. Menninger

The adjuration to be "normal" seems shockingly repellent to me; I see neither hope nor comfort in sinking to that low level. I think it is ignorance that makes people think of abnormality only with horror and allows them to remain undismayed at the proximity of "normal" to average and mediocre. For surely anyone who achieves anything is, essentially, abnormal.
Is anyone human actually normal? I'm beginning to think being normal is actually abnormal.
I don't know how to have a normal relationship because I try to act normal and love from a normal place and live a normal life, but there is sort of an abnormal magnifying glass, like telescope lens, on everything that happens.
The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does. They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society.
I think it's normal that, the first time you meet Federer or Murray or Djokovic, you're going to get nervous. But after a while, they become normal opponents, people you see every week. That's the way you have to think. You can't think of them as legends. When you see someone on court, you have to treat every opponent the same way.
I got tired of doing battle with people thinking I was a little weird because I wasn't in a band making happy, stilted music. The only people who really seem weird to me are people who think they're normal. People who think it's possible to be normal just by doing the same things that most people do. Is there a most people? I don't know. Television makes it seem like there is, but I think that might just be television.
To be honest, I think I am making normal games targeted towards normal people. But ultimately when I release those normal games, weird people find them to be weird games and enjoy them. Which probably means there's something wrong with me.
My characters all have issues, but I don't see that as weird or abnormal because I think in real life there are very few bland, normal people.
I think we all have something in our life's experience that makes us feel different. It's whether we have a gay parent or we have an alcoholic mother or maybe we don't know our father. And it's something that we feel bad about initially because we think we're abnormal. What's abnormal is our assumption that there's something called 'normal.'
I hope what people see in me is that I'm a normal guy, and that people who look as I do can do normal things.
Disease is an abnormal state of the body which primarily and independently produces a disturbance in the normal functions of the body. It may be an abnormality of temperament or form (structure). Symptom is a manifestation of some abnormal state in the body. It may be harmful as a colic pain or harmless as the flushing of cheeks in peripneumonia.
What is normal? Normal is only ordinary; mediocre. Life belongs to the rare, exceptional individual who dares to be different.
Some people are like that - closed - they can't learn from anyone. Us, for example, we can't learn anything, neither I from you nor you from me, nor from anyone, nor from anything, nor from what happens.
I have been shocked at some senior actors who made lewd comments on my body. They think it is normal, and in fact, I thought it was normal. But, much later, I failed to see how that is a normal thing.
I like to take these unusual characters and then make them as normal as possible, because we all know that the tragedy and the abnormal always hides itself behind the normal.
What's normal? I think I'm normal... Maybe I'm abnormal because I get such a thrill from real life, just real life, everyday things.
Intellectual culture seems to separate high art from low art. Low art is horror or pornography or anything that has a physical component to it and engages the reader on a visceral level and evokes a strong sympathetic reaction. High art is people driving in Volvos and talking a lot. I just don't want to keep those things separate. I think you can use visceral physical experiences to illustrate larger ideas, whether they're emotional or spiritual. I'm trying to not exclude high and low art or separate them.
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