Cancer transcriptional patterns exhibit both shared and unique features across diverse cancer types, but whether these patterns are sufficient to characterize the full breadth of tumor phenotype heterogeneity remains an open question. We hypothesized that cancer transcriptional diversity mirrors patterns in normal tissues optimized for distinct functional tasks. Starting with normal tissue transcriptomic profiles, we use non-negative matrix factorization to derive six distinct transcriptomic phenotypes, called archetypes, which combine to describe both normal tissue patterns and variations across a broad spectrum of malignancies. We show that differential enrichment of these signatures correlates with key tumor characteristics, including overall patient survival and drug sensitivity, independent of clinically actionable DNA alterations. Additionally, we show that in HR+/HER2- breast cancers, metastatic tumors adopt transcriptomic signatures consistent with the invaded tissue. Broadly, our findings suggest that cancer often arrogates normal tissue transcriptomic characteristics as a component of both malignant progression and drug response. This quantitative framework provides a strategy for connecting the diversity of cancer phenotypes and could potentially help manage individual patients.