#norm

A lot of people have gotten into comedy because of certain influences in their lives or events that were painful, and I really have wracked my brain to figure it out. I pretty much have had a normal childhood. Maybe it was too normal. ↗

— Will Ferrell

#brain #certain #childhood #comedy #events

I think that when you're writing fiction what you're doing is reflecting life as you see it, and putting down how you think and how other people think, and the sort of confusions that you don't normally like to admit to. ↗

— Helen Fielding

#confusions #doing #down #fiction #how

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 #beautiful girls #holocaust #i #life

I came here as a practical man, to talk, not simply on the question of peace and war, but to treat another question which is of hardly less importance - the enormous and burdensome standing armaments which it is the practice of modern Governments to sustain in time of peace. ↗

— Richard Cobden

#armaments #burdensome #came #enormous #governments

What I want to do is tell stories about normal people in the American suburbs. I don't write the book where it's a conspiracy reaching the prime minister; I don't write the book with the big serial killer who lops off heads. My setting is a very placid pool of suburbia, family life. And within that I can make pretty big splashes. ↗

— Harlan Coben

#american #big #book #conspiracy #family

Tragedy in life normally comes with betrayal and compromise, and trading on your integrity and not having dignity in life. That's really where failure comes. ↗

— Tom Cochrane

#comes #compromise #dignity #failure #having

In some ways, I always thought you're better off behaving like a rock star when you're a normal person. Because if you do it as a rock star, you'll end up in the papers and your life will be made a misery. ↗

— Jarvis Cocker

#because #behaving #better #better off #end

Many people on the political left found my work psychologically liberating. They began to say: once you realize that standards emerge historically, then you can see through and discard all the norms to which we have been falsely enslaved. ↗

— Stanley Fish

#began #discard #emerge #enslaved #falsely

I went to a doctor and told him I felt normal on acid, that I was a light bulb in a world of moths. That is what the manic state is like. ↗

— Carrie Fisher

#bulb #doctor #felt #him #i

I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman's inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman's fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men." "Perhaps I shall. Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything. ↗

— Jane Austen

#clichés #constancy #double-standards #education #feminism