Quotes from Jonathan Mooney

Normality is a paved road: It's comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it. —Vincent van Gogh

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.

For all of us, normal is just temporary, and we are only visiting—for a fleeting moment—the center of the bell curve.

Normal is like the horizon. The closer you get to it, the further away you are.

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.

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.

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.

Have you ever considered that you are a valuable human being, not despite your differences but because of them?

Bottom line: people with ADD have higher levels of creative thinking than those without.

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.

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.

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.

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.

People with brain and body differences have the lowest graduation rates, highest incarceration rates, and highest unemployment out of any minority group.

Don't split. Sticking it out can mean the difference between a rough time and an utter failure.

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.

Fiction has no right answers, and reading fiction is not about getting things right.

Reading is about enjoying yourself and learning about the human experience, so go for it.

In short, you can teach form but ideas are priceless.

As documented in two important books, Neurodiversity by Thomas Armstrong and The Power of Different by

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

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

I'd hire an accountant or lawyer with an anxiety disorder over one without any day of the week.

And there was the nervous one who couldn't sleep but kept everyone on time and figured out which berries not to eat.