Eccentricity : page 2 - quotes  articles  sites  books..... .Talent Development Resources --..home page...site map

True elegance is for me the manifestation of an independent mind. Isabella Rossellini from her autobiography Some of Me

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People who think unusual thoughts often lead lives different from the rest of us. Isaac Newton spent almost sixteen hours a day locked up in his rooms at Cambridge working on his ideas; he had lots of wild ones on cosmology as well as those that transformed physics.  If you spend too much time being like everybody else, you decrease your chances of coming up with something different.    Robert Ornstein, PhD, author of  The Psychology of Consciousness

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Be daring, be different, be impractical; be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.    Cecil Beaton****quoted on the Sphincter Police site sphincterpolice.com photo from Cecil Beaton by Hugo Vickers - "A book as rich, dense, thick and tasty as a fruitcake... lovers of photography... will take their time and swallow every last crumb... An enormous, unsparing, inch-by-inch... chronicle of an English snob's progress through the 20th century." Tom Wolfe, The New York Times

 
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from BUST magazine BUSTcards

 

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Reese Witherspoon has said her parents supported her ambitions to be an actress, and that, growing up in Nashville, "Being a Southern eccentric was the big influence in my family. [The standard was] How weird can you be?" ~ ~ ~ "It seems bizarrely appropriate that the enormously risky Tolkien trilogy The Lord Of The Rings is being made by a pot-bellied, barefooted, shaggy-haired Kiwi whose production company is called Wingnut Films.  "Peter Jackson is a bit of a wingnut. As a man, he is a bona fide eccentric who shows up for interviews without shoes and socks while looking more like a Hobbit than a human." from article: Eccentricity and Creativity

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I admire people who go for what they believe in, like David Lynch for example, and say what goes through their heads, and are not afraid of people not accepting them.  I have no respect for people who deliberately try to be weird to attract attention, but if that's who you honestly are, you shouldn't try to 'normalize' yourself." .....Alicia Witt

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"Superlatives arrest our attention. We observe with fascination the tallest, the shortest, the widest, the deepest, the fastest, the strongest.... While I have long written about anomalies, in dimension as well as deed, I have traditionally placed more emphasis onacquired prowess than physical exaltation.  Siamese twins, for instance, were worthy of discussion only if balanced on their heads, reciting Goliardic verse and providing their own accompaniment on violin and dulcimer."    Ricky Jay **books by Ricky Jay: Jay's Journal of Anomalies : Conjurers, Cheats, Hustlers, Hoaxsters, Pranksters, Jokesters, Imposters, Pretenders, Side-Show Showmen, Armless Calligraphers, Mechanical Marvels, Popular Entertainments Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women

[image of Ricky Jay  from linkingpage.com]

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"I'm from the Delbert Home for the Unusual" Jonathan Winters   [photo: as Humpty Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland (1985)]

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Joshua Norton (1819-1880), or as he preferred to be called, Norton I, proclaimed himself Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico in 1859. Althought a pauper, he was fed free in San Francisco's best restaurants. While rational reformers elsewhere failed to crack the national bank monopoly with alternate currency plans, Norton I had his own private currency accepted throughout San Francisco. excerpts from site > book: > book: Norton I: Emperor of the United States by William Drury

 

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"Poets and monks... We're both sort of peripheral to the world."

    Kathleen Norris ..[author: "The Cloister Walk"]
 

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The more I thought about it, the more absurd it became. I couldn't take all those rules seriously... I was the one person who had trouble with the rules. Everybody else accepted them.  Was this a mark of my madness?... Was I crazy or was I right? In 1967, this was a hard question to answer. Even twenty-five years later, it's a hard question to answer. Susanna Kaysen - from her book : Girl, Interrupted

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I'm eccentric. I don't have much social life. I don't go out much. I'm on the shy side and I don't entirely feel rooted or at home or that I belong anywhere. I don't think I ever have. ...  The term 'eccentric' means 'off-center', and what I'm interested in, both in my patients and myself, is seeing whether one can establish a different center.  I think a life has to be centered, but I think it doesn't have to be the same center.     Neurologist Oliver Sacks, M.D. - author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat  etc

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Shouldn't we expect a bit more from our cultural icons than good looks, the ability to keep their weight down and a talent for showing up on a movie set on time?  Shouldn't we, instead, be worshipping people like Isabel Garrett? ... Busty, coquettish Isabel is so infinitely more worthy of our idolatry than Gwyneth or Halle or even Dame Judi. ... For starters, Isabel is a free bird. She's a skip-along, go-anywhere kind of a gal who is a total dab hand at maneuvering a motor home, which isn't really surprising, since she spends most of the year driving around the U.S. in a rather large one.  She stops occasionally and sets up shop at the swinger conventions and biker rallies, where she sells her fetish-wear. This mobile maison de la mode is the nerve center of Body Webs, the slashed-and-sexy-spandex business that Ms. Garrett has operated since the early 1990s. from Wacky Chicks: Life Lessons from Fearlessly Inappropriate  and Fabulously Eccentric Women -- by Simon Doonan

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You know what? You're an individual, and that makes people nervous.  And it's gonna keep making people nervous for the rest of your life. Ole Golly [Rosie O'Donnell] to Harriet [Michelle Trachtenberg]  in "Harriet the Spy" (1996) - based on the book by Louise Fitzhugh

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The creator lives for his work. He needs no other men. His primary goal is within himself. ... The basic need of the creator is independence.  The reasoning mind cannot work under any form of compulsion. It cannot be curbed, sacrificed or subordinated to any consideration whatsoever. It demands total independence in function and in motive. To a creator, all relations with men are secondary. Howard Roark in The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand -- played by Gary Cooper in the movie (1949) photo of Gary Cooper by George Hurrell - related book: Hurrell's Hollywood Portraits

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I had always loved and feared my own eccentricity. I admired the unusual, yet cringed at the outcast. I wanted to stand out, but needed to fit in... I came to realize that the more honestly I became myself, the less easily I could homogenize into all cultures and circles.  I couldn't look and be like everyone else and still stay true to myself. ... Go ahead and experiment and play. Become a character in your own story. Let new identities roar from the rooftops. ..... Tama J. Kieves -*book:*This Time I Dance! Trusting the Journey of Creating the Work You Love: How One Harvard Lawyer Left It All to Have It All!

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I hope I'm becoming more eccentric. More room in the brain. Tom Waits

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Creativity is at the heart of eccentricity. One of the principal reasons eccentrics continually challenge the established order is because they want to experiment, to try out new ways of doing things.  That quality is most conspicuous in artists and scientists... ....David Weeks. Eccentrics: A Study of Sanity and Strangeness

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....articles:
 

Creativity and Irrational Forces: Eccentric Artists and Mad Scientists by Laura Gosselink
"Men have called me mad, but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence -- whether much that is glorious -- whether all that is profound -- does not spring from disease of thought--from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect. Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night" - Edgar Allen Poe; "Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Albert Einstein

Eccentricity and Creativity by Douglas Eby

Entitled to Be Exceptional by Douglas Eby
Although gifted men may also experience a self-defeating aversion to expressing feelings or aspects of themselves that might separate them from others, gifted women, according to a number of sources, are more acutely sensitive to fitting in with social expectations, and may engage in a denial of their capabilities, experience difficulty in embracing their talents and have a compromised sense of entitlement to be exceptional.

David Weeks on eccentricity [PBS NewsHour interview]

The Weirdo Route by Edward De Bono
 

  more:.........articles.........articles : giftedness.........articles.: mental health.........articles.: teen / young adult
 

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...sites:.
 

EccentricTV  "sets out to discover the most eccentric people, places and events throughout the world. You'll see outlandish festivals combined with eccentric interviews and a dash comedic skits adding spice to the most eccentric situations at hand."
sections include Eccentric Celebs; Festivals; Artists; Bands; Cars etc

The Cacophony Society "A randomly gathered network of individuals united in the pursuit of experiences beyond the pale of mainstream society through subversion, pranks, art, fringe explorations and meaningless madness. You may already be a member."

The Los Angeles Cacophony Society   "subverting reality is our business."

The San Francisco Cacophony Society

 
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....books:
 

Daniel J. Boorstin. Creators - a History of Heroes of the Imagination

Tim Burton Burton on Burton

Edward De Bono. Lateral Thinking : Creativity Step-By-Step

Howard Gardner. Creating Minds : An Anatomy of Creativity Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi

Jay S. Jacobs. Wild Years: The Music and Myth of Tom Waits

Ricky Jay. Jay's Journal of Anomalies : Conjurers, Cheats, Hustlers, Hoaxsters, Pranksters, Jokesters, Imposters, Pretenders, Side-Show Showmen, Armless Calligraphers, Mechanical Marvels, Popular Entertainments

Frances Laurence. Maverick Women: 19th Century Women Who Kicked over the Traces
Laurence, a journalist and screenwriter, here combines two of her strong interests: the history of the American West, specifically the years of the California Gold Rush, and women's history in general... [she] has selected women who broke the rules, spirited women of the frontier whose lives took paths far different from those of their contemporaries. [Library Journal, Roseanne Castellino]

Clifford A. Pickover.  Strange Brains and Genius : The Secret Lives of Eccentric Scientists and Madmen
[Publishers Weekly review:] "Filled with 200 years of eccentric geniuses, this delightful collection of profiles assembles an eclectic and fascinating sampling of scientists (as well as some artists and writers) with a far-ranging assortment of phobias, compulsions, odd belief systems, and extraordinarily weird habits. Chief among the scientists is Nikola Tesla, father of alternating current and countless other electrical devices, who could be seen on New York City's streets covered in pigeons..."

John Putzier. Weirdos in the Workplace : The New Normal --Thriving in the Age of the Individual

David Weeks. Eccentrics: A Study of Sanity and Strangeness

Jon Winokur. Encyclopedia Neurotica
This often acerbic dictionary-style guide is an indictment of the self absorption of the affluent West, and the growing tendency to categorize rather than celebrate eccentricity. "In this country, we just have so much of everything and so much time to analyze ourselves. We seem to medicalize oddity and quirkiness. I also wanted to try to make the point that, as actress Carrie Fisher said, 'All the good people are nuts.' This is what makes life so interesting," Winokur told Reuters. His book quotes Pulitzer Prize journalist Michael Skube, who in 1998 noted: "Of all the countries on earth, we are the leaders in disorders ... If we don't have attention deficit disorder, we have ... anxiety disorder, or mood disorder. Other cultures just don't seem to have the problems we do."
> from article Age of anxiety - 'Encyclopedia Neurotica' a guide to modern neuroses, CNN.com / Reuters February 3, 2005

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