Quotes from Mark Haddon

At home he was reading Pet Sematary, but reading that in public was like leaving the house in your underwear.

He sat on the tube knowing he was going to hell. The only way to reduce the hot forks when he got there was to ring Katie and Mum as soon as he got home. An

But they are different because the pictures in my head are all pictures of things which really happened. But other people have pictures in their heads of things which aren't real and didn't happen.

He was an inspector. I could tell because he wasn't wearing a uniform. He also had a very hairy nose. It looked as if there were two very small mice hiding in his nostrils.*2

Es mejor saber que una cosa buena va a pasar, como un eclipse, o que te regalen un microscopio por Navidad, que saber que una cosa mala va a pasar, como que te pongan un empaste o tener que ir a Francia. Pero creo que lo peor de todo es no saber si lo que va a pasar es una cosa buena o una cosa mala.

What he felt mostly was a relentless, grinding dread which rumbled and thundered and made the world dark, like those spaceships in science-fiction films whose battle-scorched fuselages slid onto the screen and kept on sliding onto the screen because they were, in fact, several thousand times larger than you expected when all you could see was the nose cone. The

through to the living room to watch one of my Blue Planet videos about life in the deepest parts of the ocean.

Then, when I've got a degree in maths, or physics, or maths and physics, I will be able to get a job and earn lots of money and I will be able to pay someone who can look after me and cook my meals and wash my clothes, or I will get a lady to marry me and be my wife and she can look after me so I can have company and not be on my own.

I do not tell lies. Mother used to say that was because I was a good person. But it is not because I am a good person. It is because I can't tell lies.

She can feel it all, centuries of habitation, paint over paint over plaster over stone.

Fu tentato di iniziare un altro dei regali di Natale ancora non letti. Ma bisognava lasciare che l'atmosfera di un libro si diradasse, prima di buttarsi nel prossimo [...]

I always thought it was disgusting and ugly, how the weak live their lives depending on each other shamefully licking each other's wounds. A way of life that no one could truly want. I was certain that no greatness could ever come from that. That's what I thought until I met you.

How alike they are, she and her mother, these blank sheets on which men have written their stories, the white paper under the words, making all their achievements possible and contributing nothing to the meaning. She

They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.

1 This is not a metaphor, it is a simile, which means that it really did look like there were two very small mice hiding in his nostrils and if you make a picture in your head of a man with two very small mice hiding in his nostrils you will know what the police inspector looked like. And a simile is not a lie, unless it is a bad simile.

i find people confusing. this is for 2 main reasons.

people who believe in God think God has put human beings on the earth because they think human beings are the best animal, but human beings are just an animal and they will evolve into another animal, and that animal will be cleverer and it will put human beings into a zoo, like we put chimpanzees and gorillas into a zoo. Christopher Boone

This is my knife. It is very sharp and very eager to hurt you.

He wanted to make her feel good. She couldn't remember the last time someone had done that. He

when you describe something by using a word for something that it isn't. This means that the word metaphor is a metaphor. I

sometimes the children from the school down the road see us in the street when we're getting off the bus and they shout, "Special Needs! Special Needs!" But I don't take any notice because I don't listen to what other people say and only sticks and stones can break my bones and I have my Swiss Army knife if they hit me and if I kill them it will be self-defense and I won't go to prison.

That kind of party had always scared Daisy, the smell on your clothes the next day and something else that couldn't be washed off.

Everything in the garden became suddenly vivid as if some general membrane had been peeled away.

And this means that time is a mystery,not even a thing,and no one has ever solved the puzzle of what time is,exactly. And so, if you get lost in time it is like being lost in a desert,except that you can't see the desert because it's not a thing