We are all a little weird and life’s a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love.

Quote Investigator traces the passage to Robert Fulghum, True Love: Stories Told To and By Robert Fulghum (HarperCollins, 1997), “Perspective”, p. 98. It reports checking the printed book; this run read its transcription and bibliographical notes, not the book. Fulghum’s fuller version includes an opening question, the phrase “mutually satisfying weirdness”, and a final emphasis on true love. Megan Salley’s column in The Journal-Standard, 10 February 2007, uses the shorter wording reproduced here and credits “Author Unknown”. The New York Examiner of 16 November 2011 explicitly attributes that shortened wording to Dr. Seuss. These are the earliest relevant instances located by that investigation, not a claim that every earlier use has been excluded. Quote Investigator finds no substantive evidence for Seuss’s authorship; Wikiquote also lists Fulghum under Misattributed, although its parenthetical date is 1998 rather than the 1997 first edition documented by QI. Seuss died in 1991. No full Seuss corpus was available locally, and this run did not search his books exhaustively. The assignment to Fulghum and the dated newspaper trail therefore rest on the named secondary investigation, not on a claimed negative corpus search.

1. 1997Earliest found · credited to Robert FulghumFulghum prints the fuller formulation in the section “Perspective” of True Love; this is the earliest source located by Quote Investigator.Robert Fulghum, True Love: Stories Told To and By Robert Fulghum (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), section “Perspective”, p. 98 (section begins on p. 96). Checked on another researcher’s citation, not seen first-hand. Source
2. 10 February 2007Reworded · credited to Author UnknownMegan Salley uses the shortened formulation as an epigraph, dropping “satisfying” and the final emphasis on true love, and credits an unknown author.Megan Salley, “J-S COLUMN: Love is patient, kind … and weird”, The Journal-Standard (Freeport, Illinois), News section, 10 February 2007. Checked on another researcher’s citation, not seen first-hand. Source
3. 16 November 2011Credited to Dr. SeussAn item titled “Mutual Weirdness….” introduces the shortened passage as something Dr. Seuss wrote; its author is unspecified in QI’s citation.“Mutual Weirdness….”, New York Examiner / Examiner.com, 16 November 2011 (author unspecified). Checked on another researcher’s citation, not seen first-hand. Source

A prose observation about love is circulated as a Dr. Seuss quotation. Quote Investigator locates its fuller form in Robert Fulghum’s 1997 collection True Love, in the section “Perspective”: after considering the unusual love stories in the collection, Fulghum argues for accepting people’s compatible eccentricities. A newspaper used the shortened form anonymously in 2007; by 2011 it was being credited to Dr. Seuss.

Love can be a relationship between people whose peculiarities fit together, rather than a relationship between people who are conventionally normal.

The conversational prose is often presented as a whimsical saying by the children’s author. The wording is a shortened version of Fulghum’s remark, not a line traced to a Seuss book or character.

Love, Emotions, Wisdom

• We love the things we love for what they are. Robert Frost
• To love someone means to see him as God intended him. (misattributed) Fyodor Dostoevsky
• To love at all is to be vulnerable. C. S. Lewis
• We accept the love we think we deserve. Stephen Chbosky
• no one would choose to live without friends. Aristotle

• quoteinvestigator.com/2014/02/14/love-weird
• en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Dr._Seuss#Misattributed

“We are all a little weird and life’s a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love.” Attributed to Dr. Seuss. No. Robert Fulghum wrote it, not Seuss. Quotogeny, https://quotogeny.com/q/we-are-all-a-little-weird/ (checked 25 October 2026).

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