What the **** is Normal?! Quotes

“Choosing to accept yourself is a political act. An act of liberation.”
― Francesca Martínez, What the **** is Normal?!

“My disability, it transpired, was the least of my problems. The real question became: how do I defend myself against the constant onslaught of pressures to conform to unrealistic ideals? It’s odd that society has chosen to promote such destructive ideas. Who decided that? And when? I must have missed that meeting. Surely it’s not just an accident that the Western world has adopted ‘YOU’RE NOT GOOD ENOUGH’ as one of its primary slogans. And, why has it been so furiously promoted when it creates such damaging beliefs in people? The society I was born into proclaims that people shouldn’t have to ‘suffer’ from disability but is more than happy to embrace values that cause widespread suffering. It doesn’t make sense. At all.”
― Francesca Martínez, What the **** is Normal?!

“I can’t help noticing that the few people I’ve met in my life who haven’t ‘suffered’ much have also been monumentally boring.”
― Francesca Martínez, What the **** is Normal?!

“More often than not, labels dehumanise people by reducing them to lazy stereotypes.”
― Francesca Martínez, What the **** is Normal?!

“I’m not quite sure what a normal life is. Surely everyone’s life is normal to them?”
― Francesca Martínez, What the **** is Normal?!

“I’ve seen that happiness doesn’t come from having a “normally” working mind or body. It comes from being loved and growing up in a healthy environment. If you are lucky enough to receive these things, like I was, then you’ll be well equipped to deal with life’s challenges – whatever body you inhabit.”
― Francesca Martínez, What the **** is Normal?!

“I have to thank my parents for their refusal to have a TV or computer in the house because nothing develops your imagination more than utter boredom.”
― Francesca Martínez, What the **** is Normal?!

“All we need to be happy is love, fulfilling work, self-acceptance, and freedom from fear. That’s it. It ain’t rocket science. Once you realise these goals are the only ones worth pursuing, life is a lot easier.”
― Francesca Martínez, What the **** is Normal?!

“Encountering difference is an opportunity to learn, to grow, to reach out, to connect. A chance to expand as a human being and challenge afresh your ideas, beliefs, assumptions, insecurities and prejudices.”
― Francesca Martínez, What the **** is Normal?!

“Society might favour able-bodied babies, but it is massively guilty of disabling those healthy babies once they are old enough to imbibe the toxic values of materialism.”
― Francesca Martínez, What the **** is Normal?!

“It’s pretty much impossible to expect impressionable teenagers to react positively to difference when mainstream values obsessively promote a religious adherence to prejudicial norms. How can we expect our youth to embrace diversity when the world around them is so archly, so aggressively, against it? Kids are hardly likely to accept a wobbly classmate when any deviation from the ubiquitous, tall, skinny, unshaky and Photoshopped ideal is derided as a failure of mammoth proportions.”
― Francesca Martínez, What the **** is Normal?!

“The image of a giant Unhappiness Machine came into my mind – a machine designed to pump out millions of dissatisfied consumers, who buy tons of pointless junk produced by millions of impoverished slaves.”
― Francesca Martínez, What the **** is Normal?!

“It’s a shame that much of the media have emphatically refused, for a very long time, to represent diversity, because they play a crucial role in shaping cultural attitudes.”
― Francesca Martínez, What the **** is Normal?!

“This aspirational culture and body fascism promotes worship of ‘perfection’ and fear of anything else.”
― Francesca Martínez, What the **** is Normal?!

“It’s inescapable – we live in a world where what’s seen as successful, fashionable or beautiful is heavily shaped by a power base with their own morally dubious agenda.”
― Francesca Martínez, What the **** is Normal?!

“Their sole purpose is to make you feel bad about your life because you’re not rich and famous.”
― Francesca Martínez, What the **** is Normal?!

“Reading celebrity magazines is like eating poo. Don’t do it: it’s bad for your health.”
― Francesca Martínez, What the **** is Normal?!

“It’s pretty much impossible to expect impressionable teenagers to react positively to difference when mainstream values obsessively promote a religious adherence to prejudicial norms.”
― Francesca Martínez, What the **** is Normal?!

“Now, I think of fashion as the ultimate mode of conformity.”
― Francesca Martínez, What the **** is Normal?!

“Our culture has the power to convince skinny people they are fat, young people they are old, old people they can be young, beautiful people they are plain, plain people they can be beautiful, poor people they can be rich, and rich people they’re not rich enough.”
― Francesca Martínez, What the **** is Normal?!

“Happiness is always one more purchase away, one more promotion away, one more investment away, but numerous studies show that once a person’s basic needs are met, material wealth tends not to make them any happier.”
― Francesca Martínez, What the **** is Normal?!

“And, in order to make us buy things we don’t need, advertisers have to make us believe that we need them. Desperately. So they prey on our insecurities and make us believe that we need their product in order to be ‘normal’, to fill that gaping hole – the very hole they’ve dug out of us so tenaciously in the first place.”
― Francesca Martínez, What the **** is Normal?!

“Eventually, I managed to peel it off, bit by bit, scratching at each piece until it was finally gone.”
― Francesca Martínez, What the **** is Normal?!