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“The Brightwood Stillness is a novel I could not put down. On the surface, it is the lives of normal people in trying circumstances. Deeper, it is an uncannily perceptive exploration of male psychology… Pomeroy is a brave new voice capable of taking us beyond the clichés of war and its aftermath and into the secret heart of every man. This is simply the best novel I’ve read in a long time.”

“It is often asserted that as woman has always been man's slave--subject--inferior--dependent, under all forms of government and religion, slavery must be her normal condition. This might have some weight had not the vast majority of men also been enslaved for centuries to kings and popes, and orders of nobility, who, in the progress of civilization, have reached complete equality.”

“I beg the reader not to go in search of messages. It is a term that I detest because it distresses me greatly, for it forces on me clothes that are not mine, which in fact belong to a human type that I distrust; the prophet, the soothsayer, the seer. I am none of these; I'm a normal man with a good memory who fell into a maelstrom and got out of it more by luck than by virtue, and who from that time on has preserved a certain curiosity about maelstroms large and small, metaphorical and actual.”

“Political agitation, by the passions it arouses or the convictions it engenders, may in fact stimulate men to the violation of the law. Detestation of existing policies is easily transformed into forcible resistance of the authority which puts them in execution, and it would be folly to disregard the causal relation between the two. Yet to assimilate agitation, legitimate as such, with direct incitement to violent resistance, is to disregard the tolerance of all methods of political agitation which in normal times is a safeguard of free government.”

“Stupidity is a factor to be reckoned with in human affairs. The true leader always expects to encounter it, and prepares to endure it patiently so long as it is normal stupidity. He knows that his ideas will be distorted, his orders carelessly executed; and that there will be jealousy among his assistants. He takes these inevitable phenomena into account, and instead of attempting to find men without faults, who are non-existent, he tries to make use of the best men at his disposal - as they are, and not as they ought to be.”

“The Bobbit case, which brought to life the ancient mythic archetype of woman as castrator, demonstrated that women are as aggressive as men and that sex is a dark, dangerous force of nature. But of course the feminist establishment, stuck in its battered-woman blinders, learned nothing as usual from this lurid refutation of its normal views. Classic art works like Bizet's Carmen tell us more about the irrationality of love, jealousy and revenge than do all the pat formulas of the counseling industry.”

“I don't think victory over death... is anything so superficial as a person fulfilling their normal span of life. It can be twofold; a victory over death by the man who faces it for himself without fear, and a victory by those who, loving him, know that death is but a little thing compared with the fact that he lived and was the kind of person he was.”

“I have always directed my attempts at the figurative representation of objects by way of summary and not very descriptive brushstrokes, diverging greatly from the real objective measurements of things, and this has led many people to talk about childish drawing.. ..this position of seeing them (the objects) without looking at them too much, without focussing more attention on them than any ordinary man would in normal everyday life..”

“The Germans gathered together ethnic divisions from all over Europe in which men of the same linguistic and cultural background could serve together. The Georgian SS division conducted itself with distinction in normal military action, but a good many people seem to think that anybody who was ever a member of the SS was automatically a war criminal.”

“Consider in what way the industrial system developed upon capitalist lines. Why were a few rich men put with such ease into possession of the new methods? Why was it normal and natural in their eyes and in that of contemporary society that those who produced the new wealth with the new machinery should be proletarian and dispossessed?”

“The President of the United States has super star status. He's not a normal person, because he's protected like no other person in the world and if this man's life is in danger, the whole world is kind of in peril in a way, because the leader of the free world could fall into the hands of terrorists.”

“Navajo infants get so attached to cradleboard that they cry to be tied into it. Kikuyu infants in Kenya get handed around several"mothers," all wives to one man. . . . Mothers in rural Guatemala keep their infants quiet, in dark huts. Middle-class American mothers talk a blue streak at them. Israeli kibbutz mothers give them over to a communal caretaker . . . Japanese mothers sleep with them. . . . All these tactics are compatible with normal health--physical and mental--and development in infancy. So one lesson for parents so far seems to be: Let a hundred flowers bloom.”

“It has been remarked that when one passes among the patients of the psychiatric ward, he encounters among the several sufferers every aspect of normal personality in morbid exaggeration. ... As one passes through the modern centers of enterprise and of higher learning, he is met with similar autonomies of development. ... The scientist, the technician, the scholar, who have left the One for the Many are puffed up with vanity over their ability to describe precisely some minute portion of the world. Men so obsessed with fragments can no more be reasoned with than other psychotics.”

“A few ideas seem to be agreed upon. Help none but those who help themselves. Educate only at schools which provide in some form for industrial education. These two points should be insisted upon. Let the normal instruction be that men must earn their own living, and that by the labor of their hands as far as may be. This is the gospel of salvation for the colored man. Let the labor not be servile, but in manly occupations like that of the carpenter, the farmer, and the blacksmith.”

“There are three kinds of nature in man, as Nicetas Stethatos further explains: the carnal man, who wants to live for his own pleasure, even if it harms others; the natural man, who wants to please both himself and others; and the spiritual man, who wants to please only God, even if it harms himself. The first is lower than human nature, the second is normal, the third is above nature; it is life in Christ.”

“I feel like we're looked at as either completely nonsexual characters or overly sexual characters, and I feel like that affects how we're treated in the public space by men. I believe that women of color experience street harassment in a very hyper way. So I wanted to draw these women in their very normal, regular states and put those images out there in the public for people to see, instead of these other, very sexualized, images of women.”

“Most talk about 'super-geniuses' is nonsense. I have found that when 'stars' drop out, successors are usually at hand to fill their places, and the successors are merely men who have learned by application and self-discipline to get full production from an average, normal brain.”

“About two-thirds of the face of Marx is beard, a vast solemn wooly uneventful beard that must have made all normal exercise impossible. It is not the sort of beard that happens to a man, it is a beard cultivated, cherished, and thrust patriarchally upon the world.”

“The effort to make financial or political profit out of the destruction of character can only result in public calamity. Gross and reckless assaults on character, whether on the stump or in newspaper, magazine, or book, create a morbid and vicious public sentiment, and at the same time act as a profound deterrent to able men of normal sensitiveness and tend to prevent them from entering the public service at any price.”

“So it seems that because of every syndrome and disorder we've invented in the past twenty years, the Los Angeles Times reported that 63% of American families are now considered dysfunctional. My God! That means we're the majority. We're normal! It's the people who have the mommy, the daddy, the brother, the sister, the little white picket fence - those people are the freaks, man!”