Mark Haddon Quotes

36 Sourced Quotes

Then he asked if I didn't like things changing. And I said I wouldn't mind things changing if I became an astronaut, for example, which is one of the biggest changes you can imagine, apart from becoming a girl or dying.

Mark Haddon
And Father said, "Christopher, do you understand that I love you?" And I said "Yes," because loving someone is helping them when they get into trouble, and looking after them, and telling them the truth, and Father looks after me when I get into trouble, like coming to the police station, and he looks after me by cooking meals for me, and he always tells me the truth, which means that he loves me.

Mark Haddon
Because when we look up into the sky at night there will be no darkness, just the blazing light of billions and billions of stars, all falling.

Mark Haddon
I do not tell lies. Mother used to say that this was because I was a good person. But it is not because I am a good person. It is because I do not tell lie.

Mark Haddon
Most murders are committed by someone who is known to the victim. In fact, you are most likely to be murdered by a member of your own family on Christmas day.

Mark Haddon
But I said that you could still want something that is very unlikely to happen.

Mark Haddon
Everyone has learning difficulties, because learning to speak French or understanding relativity is difficult.

Mark Haddon
And this shows that sometimes people want to be stupid and they do not want to know the truth.

Mark Haddon
Eventually scientists will discover something that explains ghosts, just like they discovered electricity, which explained lightning, and it might be something about people's brains, or something about the earth's magnetic field, or it might be some new force altogether. And then ghosts won't be mysteries. They will be like electricity and rainbows and nonstick frying pans.

Mark Haddon
Sometimes we get sad about things and we don't like to tell other people that we are sad about them. We like to keep it a secret. Or sometimes, we are sad but we really don't know why we are sad, so we say we aren't sad but we really are.

Mark Haddon
And I went into the garden and lay down and looked at the stars in the sky and made myself negligible.

Mark Haddon
Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life.

Mark Haddon
He really did not care whether he survived or not, so long as it rendered him unconscious and absolved him of responsibility.

Mark Haddon
And then I thought that I had to be like Sherlock Holmes and I had to detach my mind at will to a remarkable degree so that I did not notice how much it was hurting inside my head.

Mark Haddon
It exasperated her sometimes. The way men could be so sure of themselves. They put words together like sheds or shelves and you could stand on them they were so solid. And those feelings which overwhelmed you in the small hours turned to smoke.

Mark Haddon
How pleased we are to have our eyes opened but how easily we close them again.

Mark Haddon
Books are like people. Some look deceptively attractive from a distance, some deceptively unappealing; some are easy company, some demand hard work that isn't guaranteed to pay off. Some become friends and say friends for life. Some change in our absence - or perhaps it is we who change in theirs - and we meet up again only to find that we don't get along any more.

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

Mark Haddon
But I don't feel sad about it. Because Mother is dead. And because Mr. Shears isn't around anymore. So I would be feeling sad about something that isn't real and doesn't exist. And that would be stupid.

Mark Haddon
And I know I can do this because I went to London on my own, and because I solved the mystery…and I was brave and I wrote a book and that means I can do anything.

Mark Haddon
And what he meant was that maths wasn't like life because in life there are no straightforward answers in the end

Mark Haddon
I like dogs. You always know what a dog is thinking. It has four moods. Happy, sad, cross and concentrating. Also, dogs are faithful and they do not tell lies because they cannot talk.

Mark Haddon
I think people believe in heaven because they don't like the idea of dying, because they want to carry on living and they don't like the idea that other people will move into their house and put their things into the rubbish.

Mark Haddon
On the fifth day, which was a Sunday, it rained very hard. I like it when it rains hard. It sounds like white noise everywhere, which is like silence but not empty.

Mark Haddon
People say that you always have to tell the truth. But they do not mean this because you are not allowed to tell old people that they are old and you are not allowed to tell people if they smell funny or if a grown-up has made a fart. And you are not allowed to say, 'I don't like you,' unless that person has been horrible to you.

Mark Haddon
All the other children at my school are stupid. Except I'm not meant to call them stupid, even though this is what they are.

Mark Haddon
I do not like strangers because I do not like people I have never met before. They are hard to understand.

Mark Haddon
Siobhan also says that if you close your mouth and breathe out loudly through your nose it can mean that you are relaxed, or that you are bored, or that you are angry and it all depends on how much air comes out of your nose and how fast and what shape your mouth is when you do it and how you are sitting and what you just said before and hundreds of other things which are too complicated to work out in a few seconds.

Mark Haddon
But in life you have to take lots of decisions and if you don't take decisions you would never do anything because you would spend all your time choosing between things you could do. So it is good to have a reason why you hate some things and you like others.

Mark Haddon
Being clever was when you looked at how things were and used the evidence to work out something new.

Mark Haddon