Norman Rockwell Quotes

“there's a part in the essay that kind of does this academic "Let's unpack the idea of Lynchian and what Lynchian means is something about the unbelievably grotesque existing in a kind of union with the unbelievably banal," and then it gives a series of scenarios about what -- what is and what isn't Lynchian. Jeffrey Dahmer was borderline Lynchian...what was Lynchian was having the actual food products next to the disembodied bits of the corpse. I guess the big one is, you know, a regular domestic murder is not Lynchian. But if the man -- if the police come to the scene and see the man standing over the body and the woman -- let's see, the woman's '50s bouffant is undisturbed and the man and the cops have this conversation about the fact that the man killed the woman because she persistently refused to buy, say, for instance, Jif peanut butter rather than Skippy, and how very, very important that is, and if the cops found themselves somehow agreeing that there were major differences between the brands and that a wife who didn't recognize those differences was deficient in her wifely duties, that would be Lynchian -- this weird confluence of very dark, surreal, violent stuff and absolute, almost Norman Rockwell, banal, American stuff, which is terrain he's been working for quite a while -- I mean, at least since -- at least since "Blue Velvet.”
― David Foster Wallace

“There are white moms who threw stones at the little girls in Little Rock and there are white moms who wish Andres and Omar and Elias and Greta's mom will be deported too.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“The startling truth is this: as this narrative unfolded, amidst all the voices breaking free, telling their stories for the first time, the loudest voice of all was that of Norman Rockwell.”
― Jane Allen Petrick, Hidden in Plain Sight: The Other People in Norman Rockwell's America

“Rockwell once said, 'The commonplaces of America are to me the richest subjects in art.' His paintings depict the dignity of everyday people, like the books of Charles Dickens, who in many ways was like Rockwell, appreciated by the masses in his lifetime, but not until after death by critics, and they were both the most fabulous storytellers....”
― Karen Weinreb, The Summer Kitchen