Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Cormier

Cormier’s method is a small sentence with a quiet threat inside it: he doesn’t invent freaks, he stresses test the rest of us. “Real people” signals a commitment to the ordinary - kids, families, teachers, local power brokers - the kinds of characters who usually get protected by genre conventions or moral clarity. Then he drops them into “extraordinary situations,” and suddenly the comforting idea of a stable self starts to wobble. The point isn’t spectacle. It’s exposure.

The subtext is almost ethical, almost cruel: if you want to know what someone is, remove the usual exits. Cormier’s fiction is famous for refusing the tidy, inspirational arc; the extraordinary circumstance isn’t a fantasy doorway, it’s a pressure chamber. In that sense, the line is a manifesto against sentimental coming-of-age stories. Adolescence, in his hands, isn’t a training montage toward adulthood; it’s the first time you notice how institutions, peer hierarchies, and “good intentions” can behave like machinery.

Context matters here. Writing in the postwar American landscape - suspicious of authority, aware of propaganda, newly fluent in disillusionment - Cormier brought a darker adult realism into young adult literature. His extraordinary situations often look like heightened versions of everyday coercion: bullying that becomes organized, a school that becomes a regime, a dare that becomes an ideology. He isn’t claiming that life is always extreme; he’s insisting that the extreme is latent in the normal, waiting for the right trigger. That’s why the line works: it frames fiction as a moral experiment, with the reader implicated as both observer and participant.