Normal Sucks Quotes

“Normality is a paved road: It’s comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it. —Vincent van Gogh”
― Jonathan Mooney, Normal Sucks: How to Live, Learn, and Thrive, Outside the Lines

“I wonder if we recognize the irony of telling people to act normal, because to act is to perform a role that isn’t real. And I wonder if we truly understand what it does to a human being to tell them to pretend to be someone, or something, they are not, and how this demand requires people to repress, efface, and cover up who they really are.”
― Jonathan Mooney, Normal Sucks: How to Live, Learn, and Thrive, Outside the Lines

“For all of us, normal is just temporary, and we are only visiting—for a fleeting moment—the center of the bell curve.”
― Jonathan Mooney, Normal Sucks: How to Live, Learn, and Thrive, Outside the Lines

“Have you ever considered that you are a valuable human being, not despite your differences but because of them?”
― Jonathan Mooney, Normal Sucks: How to Live, Learn, and Thrive, Outside the Lines

“Normal is like the horizon. The closer you get to it, the further away you are.”
― Jonathan Mooney, Normal Sucks: How to Live, Learn, and Thrive, Outside the Lines

“How negative eugenics, as it came to be known, emerged as the focus of the movement is, on one hand, complicated, involving many different fields of science and points of view, all occurring within a context of massive social disruptions. But on the other hand, it’s not complicated at all. We like having people exist lower on the pecking order than we do. And so the great sorting of humans into categories of deficiency gave eugenicists the perfect target: the abnormals and defectives.”
― Jonathan Mooney, Normal Sucks: How to Live, Learn, and Thrive, Outside the Lines

“Bottom line: people with ADD have higher levels of creative thinking than those without.”
― Jonathan Mooney, Normal Sucks: How to Live, Learn, and Thrive, Outside the Lines

“On the surface, these stories of correction might seem different, but really, at their core, they are all the same. To be abnormal is to be delegitimized as a full human being, and to be made normal through remediation and intervention hurts. When a human being is pathologized, they become less than human, and then we humans do terrible things.”
― Jonathan Mooney, Normal Sucks: How to Live, Learn, and Thrive, Outside the Lines

“normal had a key advantage because it could mean more than one thing. Its ambiguity was its strength.”
― Jonathan Mooney, Normal Sucks: How to Live, Learn, and Thrive, Outside the Lines

“Because normal is contingent—on history, on power, and, most of all, on flawed humans faking it until they make it.”
― Jonathan Mooney, Normal Sucks: How to Live, Learn, and Thrive, Outside the Lines

“It is a crime every time we ask ourselves how smart a person is, instead of asking ourselves what makes that person smart.”
― Jonathan Mooney, Normal Sucks: How to Live, Learn, and Thrive, Outside the Lines

“And there was the nervous one who couldn’t sleep but kept everyone on time and figured out which berries not to eat.”
― Jonathan Mooney, Normal Sucks: How to Live, Learn, and Thrive, Outside the Lines

“I’d hire an accountant or lawyer with an anxiety disorder over one without any day of the week.”
― Jonathan Mooney, Normal Sucks: How to Live, Learn, and Thrive, Outside the Lines

“The higher the levels of anxiety, the more likely a person is to have a high IQ. Genetic research suggests that intelligence may have co-evolved with worry in humans,”
― Jonathan Mooney, Normal Sucks: How to Live, Learn, and Thrive, Outside the Lines

“As documented in two important books, Neurodiversity by Thomas Armstrong and The Power of Different by”
― Jonathan Mooney, Normal Sucks: How to Live, Learn, and Thrive, Outside the Lines

“We are all only temporarily able bodies and minds. Statistically, what have been labeled mental and physical “abnormalities” or disabilities are essential to the human condition, are in fact the human condition.”
― Jonathan Mooney, Normal Sucks: How to Live, Learn, and Thrive, Outside the Lines

“what John Holt, a former professor of education at Harvard, knew intellectually: for every day that school is toxic, it takes one day to heal. My mom knew something about healing because”
― Jonathan Mooney, Normal Sucks: How to Live, Learn, and Thrive, Outside the Lines

“What I do know is that there was a way out for me. I know that I don’t feel stupid anymore. I don’t believe I’m defective anymore. I don’t hurt the way I hurt that day in my room with that bottle of pills anymore. There was for me, and there is for you, a way to, as the philosopher Judith Butler wrote, “work the trap that one is inevitably in.” Normal must be resisted if you are ever going to live your life, as who you are, fully, in all your complexity.”
― Jonathan Mooney, Normal Sucks: How to Live, Learn, and Thrive, Outside the Lines

“My dad is the kind of dad who tried to eliminate himself. My dad’s story is all too common, because when we don’t fit in, many of us believe we shouldn’t exist, and we try, as my dad did, as I did, to disappear.”
― Jonathan Mooney, Normal Sucks: How to Live, Learn, and Thrive, Outside the Lines

“People with brain and body differences have the lowest graduation rates, highest incarceration rates, and highest unemployment out of any minority group.”
― Jonathan Mooney, Normal Sucks: How to Live, Learn, and Thrive, Outside the Lines