“The Hiroshima people’s experience, is a picture of what our whole world is always poised to become, a backdrop of scarcely imaginable horror lying just behind the surface of our normal life, and capable of breaking through into that normal life at any second.”—The New Yorker, February 1, 1982.”
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Jonathan Schell 3
American author 1943–2014Related quotes

Bowdoin Academic Spotlight interview (2011)
Context: You have to take advantage of the opportunities that life gives you, particularly the moments in time when you have time, when you're between jobs or you retire. Get out and go. I think most of us are way too intense. We need to take a deep breath and do things that maybe don't fit the normal picture of what we're supposed to do at that stage of life. In some ways, this book is one big argument for just plain loosening up.

“Good in Crisis; Sucks at Normal.’ That about sums up my whole life, doesn’t it?”
Source: UnSouled
Noble House (1981)
Context: "Changi changed everyone, changed values permanently. For instance, it gave you a dullness about death — we saw too much of it to have the same sort of meaning to outsiders, to normal people. We are a generation of dinosaurs, we the few who survived. I suppose anyone who goes to war, any war, sees life with different eyes if they end up in one piece."
What did you see?"
"A lot of bull that's worshipped as the be-all and end-all of existence. So much of 'normal, civilized' life is bull that you can't imagine. … What frightens you, doesn't frighten me, what frightens me, you'd laugh at."

“There is no such thing in life as normal”
Ref: en.wikiquote.org - Lauretta Bender / Quotes / 1954 Senate Subcommittee Hearings into Juvenile Delinquency, "Testimony of Dr. Lauretta Bender, senior psychiatrist, Belleveu hospital Newyork N.Y." http://www.thecomicbooks.com/bender.html
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