Jonathan Mooney > 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

“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

“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

“I can’t divorce Kent and his art from what causes pain in Kent’s life. This is true in the lives of many individuals labeled ADHD. Their greatest gifts are interwoven with their greatest weaknesses. This might be true for all of us. But we can make something beautiful from this paradox. Our lives can sometimes be a sort of poem—part genetics, part individual adaptation.”
― Jonathan Mooney, The Short Bus: A Journey Beyond Normal

“Education is one of the most beautiful and liberating things we can pursue in our lives, but too often it is approached as a restrictive, punitive, linear, and moralistic act.”
― Jonathan Mooney, Learning 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

“Disability is inherently a negation. In our culture, people with disabilities stand more for what they are not than what they are—not normal, not whole—a negation that calls into being its opposite: the normal. The normal looms over all of our lives, an impossible goal that we are told is possible if: if we sit still, if we buy certain consumer goods, if we exercise, if we fix our teeth, if we … The short bus polices that terrain; it patrols a fabricated social boundary demarcating what is healthy and sick, acceptable and broken, enforcing normalcy in all of us. What had I lost in trying to belong to the other side?”
― Jonathan Mooney, The Short Bus: A Journey Beyond Normal

“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

“The cold reality is that much of the valuable information relevant to our intellectual, personal, and academic development is locked within the covers of books in the code of written language.”
― Jonathan Mooney

“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

“Often the topography of who we are is not a story, is not constituted in language, but in the concrete things we do, the places we visit, and the people we know and love.”
― Jonathan Mooney, The Short Bus: A Journey Beyond Normal

“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

“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

“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

“Don't split. Sticking it out can mean the difference between a rough time and an utter failure.”
― Jonathan Mooney, Learning Outside The Lines: Two Ivy League Students with Learning Disabilities and ADHD Give You the Tools for Academic Success and Educational Revolution

“I live with a different perception—maybe it wasn’t so different when I was born, maybe then it was just a specific deficit like the experts talk about—but by now, after twenty-four-plus years, it sure is a different way of beingthinkingacting. I’m not denying my weaknesses, but I’m not apologizing for them either.”
― Jonathan Mooney, Learning 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

“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

“In short, you can teach form but ideas are priceless.”
― Jonathan Mooney, Learning Outside The Lines : Two Ivy League Students With Learning Disabilities And ADHD Give You The Tools For Academic Success and Educational Revolution

“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

“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

“What I can tell you is what I learned from Jeff, and that is this: If you watch the strange, the other, the bizarre long enough, if you really see these people, you will find familiar pieces of yourself in their experiences. Empathy may be our only hope. I found in Jeff not just something familiar but also a better way to live.”
― Jonathan Mooney, The Short Bus: A Journey Beyond Normal

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Fiction has no right answers, and reading fiction is not about getting things right.”
― Jonathan Mooney, Learning Outside The Lines : Two Ivy League Students With Learning Disabilities And ADHD Give You The Tools For Academic Success and Educational Revolution