"Everybody's like everybody else, and everybody's different from everybody else"
About this Quote
Harvey Pekar’s line reads like a shrug that turns out to be a philosophy. It’s blunt, almost deliberately unliterary: no lyrical flourish, no grand moral. That’s the point. Pekar, the patron saint of ordinary life in American Splendor, built an entire body of work by insisting that the “unremarkable” is where the drama actually hides. This quote captures his method in one clean paradox.
The first clause, “Everybody’s like everybody else,” punctures the cult of specialness. Pekar isn’t romanticizing the crowd; he’s leveling it. We all queue up at the DMV, resent our bosses, misread someone’s tone, want to be seen. It’s a corrective to the kind of storytelling that only knows how to spotlight geniuses, heroes, or beautiful disasters.
Then he flips it: “and everybody’s different from everybody else.” That’s the humanizing twist, and it’s why the line doesn’t land as cynical. Pekar’s subtext is that sameness is the surface layer - the routines, the economic pressures, the social scripts. Difference is the grain of a voice, the odd private obsession, the way a person narrates their own day. His comics often function like interviews with reality: the same city blocks, the same jobs, but infinitely varied interior weather.
Context matters: Pekar was writing against glossy, escapist American mythologies. His intent isn’t to split the difference between two truths; it’s to demand that we hold both at once, because that tension is where empathy actually starts.
The first clause, “Everybody’s like everybody else,” punctures the cult of specialness. Pekar isn’t romanticizing the crowd; he’s leveling it. We all queue up at the DMV, resent our bosses, misread someone’s tone, want to be seen. It’s a corrective to the kind of storytelling that only knows how to spotlight geniuses, heroes, or beautiful disasters.
Then he flips it: “and everybody’s different from everybody else.” That’s the humanizing twist, and it’s why the line doesn’t land as cynical. Pekar’s subtext is that sameness is the surface layer - the routines, the economic pressures, the social scripts. Difference is the grain of a voice, the odd private obsession, the way a person narrates their own day. His comics often function like interviews with reality: the same city blocks, the same jobs, but infinitely varied interior weather.
Context matters: Pekar was writing against glossy, escapist American mythologies. His intent isn’t to split the difference between two truths; it’s to demand that we hold both at once, because that tension is where empathy actually starts.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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