Daily Inspiration Quote by Dave Sim

“Everyone is normal until you get to know them” is the kind of line that lands because it flatters the reader’s private suspicion: normalcy is mostly a surface effect, a costume we all wear in public. Coming from Dave Sim, a cartoonist who built a career on turning social types into exaggerated, revealing caricatures, it reads less like a cozy humanist observation and more like a dry indictment of the category itself. “Normal” isn’t a truth here; it’s a first impression, a lazy label people apply when they haven’t paid the cost of attention.

The intent is blunt: to puncture the social convenience of treating others as predictable. Sim’s phrasing is clean, almost throwaway, which is exactly why it works. The sentence sets up “normal” as the default setting, then flips it with the quiet menace of “until.” Knowledge becomes a solvent. Intimacy isn’t romanticized; it’s framed as the process by which the myth of standard-issue people collapses.

Subtext: what we call “weird” is often just specificity. Once you learn someone’s habits, contradictions, private fixations, and unedited history, the tidy archetype breaks. There’s also a sly mirror held up to the speaker: if everyone ceases to be normal when examined closely, then the observer’s standards are the unstable part.

Contextually, it’s a cartoonist’s maxim about characters and readers as much as about real life: the farther you zoom in, the less any outline holds. It’s a warning against snap judgments, but also a reminder that “normal” is less a diagnosis than a distance.