The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well.
Joe AncisSo I close this long reflection on what I hope is a not-too-quaveringly semi-Semitic note. When I am at home, I will only enter a synagogue for the bar or bat mitzvah of a friend's child, or in order to have a debate with the faithful. (When I was to be wed, I chose a rabbi named Robert Goldburg, an Einsteinian and a Shakespearean and a Spinozist, who had married Arthur Miller to Marilyn Monroe and had a copy of Marilyn’s conversion certificate. He conducted the ceremony in Victor and Annie Navasky's front room, with David Rieff and Steve Wasserman as my best of men.) I wanted to do something to acknowledge, and to knit up, the broken continuity between me and my German-Polish forebears. When I am traveling, I will stop at the shul if it is in a country where Jews are under threat, or dying out, or were once persecuted. This has taken me down queer and sad little side streets in Morocco and Tunisia and Eritrea and India, and in Damascus and Budapest and Prague and Istanbul, more than once to temples that have recently been desecrated by the new breed of racist Islamic gangster. (I have also had quite serious discussions, with Iraqi Kurdish friends, about the possibility of Jews genuinely returning in friendship to the places in northern Iraq from which they were once expelled.) I hate the idea that the dispossession of one people should be held hostage to the victimhood of another, as it is in the Middle East and as it was in Eastern Europe. But I find myself somehow assuming that Jewishness and 'normality' are in some profound way noncompatible. The most gracious thing said to me when I discovered my family secret was by Martin, who after a long evening of ironic reflection said quite simply: 'Hitch, I find that I am a little envious of you.' I choose to think that this proved, once again, his appreciation for the nuances of risk, uncertainty, ambivalence, and ambiguity. These happen to be the very things that 'security' and 'normality,' rather like the fantasy of salvation, cannot purchase.
Christopher HitchensTags: shakespeare einstein religion atheism security salvation marilyn-monroe antisemitism islam iraq germany jews rabbis debate poland india spinoza temples ancestors middle-east normality martin-amis damascus prague eastern-europe desecration synagogues jewish-question david-rieff jewishness annie-navasky arthur-miller bar-and-bat-mitzvah best-man budapest eritrea istanbul kurdish-people morocco religious-conversion robert-goldburg steve-wasserman tunisia victor-saul-navasky
Living is abnormal.
Eugène IonescoNormality is the Great Neurosis of civilization.
Tom Robbins[T]he normal and the everyday are often amazingly unstoppable, and what is unimaginable is the cessation of them. The world is resilient, and, no matter what interruptions occur, people so badly want to return to their lives and get on with them. A veneer of civilization descends quickly, like a shining rain. Dust is settled.
Lorrie MooreTags: life civilization 9-11 disaster normality resiliency
Normal....
What the majority of people look, act, and talk and like.
So what if the majority became what we see as wierd now?
Would our normal, become our new wierd?
Tags: humor future people popularity strangeness normality wierdness
Being famous is wicked, but being normal is better.
Rupert GrintNormality wasn't in the days I'd left behind me: it was only to be found in whatever fortune placed in my path each morning.
María DueñasTags: fortune life-philosophy past-and-future normality
A man does not have to feel less than human to realize his sin; oppositely, he has to realize that he gets no special vindication for his sin.
Criss JamiTags: equality human sin forgiveness salvation confession excuses torture repentance ridicule normal realization special insulting equal normality sinner vindication exceptions confronting-problems demeaning degrading
-Oamenii care intarzie de obicei nu inteleg niciodata nenumaratele moduri in care dau peste cap programul celor punctuali si normali, ii spuse Penn in timp ce tranversau o portiune mai alunecoasa a peluzei.
Lauren KateTags: punctuality normality program
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