Quotes from Mark Haddon

And it was exactly like having flu that time because I wanted it to stop, like you can just pull the plug of a computer out of the wall if it crashes, because I wanted to go to sleep so that I wouldn't have to think because the only thing I could think was how much it hurt because there was no room for anything else in my head, but I couldn't go to sleep and I just had to sit there and there was nothing to do except to wait and hurt.

Places remained and time flowed through them like wind through the grass. Right now. This was the future turning into the past. One thing becoming another. Like a flame on the end of a match. Wood turning into smoke. If only we could burn brighter. A barn roaring in the night.

sometimes people want to be stupid and they do not want to know the truth.

Maybe it wasn't God after all, maybe it was the heart which punished one with such exquisite accuracy.

Life is difficult, you know. It's bloody hard telling the truth all the time. Sometimes it's impossible.

Some people think the Milky Way is a long line of stars, but it isn't. Our galaxy is a huge disk of stars millions of light-years across, and the solar system is somewhere near the outside edge of the disk.

Snow... blots and softens the top of every object like ice on a plum pudding. Hedges, telegraph wires, cars, postboxes, recycling bins. The world is losing its edges. Look upwards and it seems as if the stars themselves are being poured from the sky and turn out not to be vast and fiery globes after all but tiny, frozen things which melt in the palm of your hand.

but I do not want my name to mean a story about being kind and helpful. I want my name to mean me.

I took the little radio from the kitchen and I went and sat in the spare room and I tuned it halfway between two stations so that all I could hear was white noise and I turned the volume up really loud and I held it against my ear and the sound filled my head and it hurt so that I couldn't feel any other sort of hurt, like the hurt in my chest

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 is not a thing.

Everything seemed suspended, in some kind of balance. Obviously someone would come along and fuck it up, because that's what other people did.

He said that it was very difficult to become an astronaut. I said that I knew. You had to become an officer in the air force and you had to take lots of orders and be prepared to kill other human beings, and I couldn't take orders. Also I didn't have 20/20 vision, which you needed to be a pilot.

Because time is not like space. And when you put something down somewhere, like a protractor or a biscuit, you can have a map in your head to tell you where you have left it, but even if you don't have a map it will still be there because a map is a representation of things that actually exist so you can find the protractor or the biscuits again. And a timetable is a map of time, except that if you don't have a timetable, time isn't there like the landing and the garden and the route to school.

Family, that slippery word, a star to every wandering bark, and everyone sailing under a different sky.

It was like pressing your thumbnail against a radiator when it's really hot and the pain starts and it makes you want to cry and the pain keeps hurting even when you take your thumb away from the radiator.

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

when people tell you what to do it is usually confusing and does not make sense. For example, people often say "Be quiet," but they don't tell you how long to be quiet for. Or you see a sign which says KEEP OFF THE GRASS but it should say KEEP OFF THE GRASS AROUND THIS SIGN or KEEP OFF ALL THE GRASS IN THIS PARK because there is lots of grass you are allowed to walk on.

People stick hearts on Valentine's cards and get married in white dresses and give each other flowers. They think love is every-thing going right. That's not love. That's self-indulgence. That's good luck. Love is when you walk into the burning building. Love is when the person who means most to you in the world is breathing through a mask and pissing in a bag. Love is when they no longer know your name.

most people are almost blind and they don't see most things and there is lots of spare capacity in their heads and it is filled with things which aren't connected and are silly, like, "I'm worried that I might have left the gas cooker on.

How often did he feel it now, this gorgeous, furtive seclusion? In the bath sometimes, maybe. Though Jean failed to understand his need for periodic isolation and regularly dragged him back to earth mid-soak by hammering on the locked door in search of bleach or dental floss.

He had always thought of solitary diners as sad. But now that he was the solitary diner, he felt rather superior. On account of the book, mostly. Learning something while everyone else was wasting time. Like working at night.

He held up his right hand and spread my fingers out in a fan. I held up my left hand and spread my fingers out in a fan and we made our fingers and thumbs touch each other.

How do you remember this stuff? But why had she forgotten? That was the real question.

En la vida tienes que tomar montones de decisiones, y si no tomaras decisiones, nunca harías nada, porque te pasarías todo el tiempo eligiendo entre las cosas que hacer. O sea, que es bueno tener una razón por la que odias unas cosas y te gustan otras.