“This was always the hard part. If you knew what was normal to the enemy, then everything became easy: you could lull them to sleep by feeding them normal, and you could scare the hell out of them by suddenly taking normal away. But normal to Afghans and Chechens was so different from normal to Russians that it took a bit of work for a man like Sokolov to establish what it was.”
Day 2
Reamde (2011), Part I: Nine Dragons
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Neal Stephenson167
American science fiction writer 1959Related quotes
E. F. Codd (1923–2003) computer scientist
http://www.dba-oracle.com/oracle_tips_codd_obit.htm
Relational Database: A Practical Foundation for Productivity (1982)
“You have sexual tendencies that are not normal, and you should be ashamed of them.”
Scott Dikkers (1965) American comic writer
Source: You Are Worthless: Depressing Nuggets of Wisdom Sure to Ruin Your Day
Elizabeth Chandler (1954) writer
Source: The Back Door of Midnight
“Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly.”
Charles Addams (1912–1988) Cartoonist
Jane Rogers book The Testament of Jessie Lamb
Source: The Testament of Jessie Lamb (2011), Chapter 1 (pp. 6-7)
Mark Ames (1965) American writer and journalist
Part VI: Welcome to the Dollhouse, page 239.
Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion, From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond (2005)
“Normally, they want me to be rude to them.”
Simon Cowell (1959) English reality television judge, television producer and music executive
Quoted in interview, Playboy magazine (February 2007)
2000s
Context: Normally, they want me to be rude to them. People come up to me and sing, and I say "That was great. Thank you." And they're like "Well, aren't you going to be rude to me?" No! When I miss auditions, contestants get upset that I'm not there, because they expect me to be cruel to them — it's some sort of badge of honor. That's how crazy everything is.
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1919–1980) Shah of Iran
As quoted in Gholam R. Afkhami (2009) The life and times of the Shah, page 591
Attributed