Quotes by Mark Haddon

“But I said that you could still want something that is very unlikely to happen.”

“Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well.”

“Things can be funny when people are uneasy. It softens them up and stops them falling asleep on the sofa. I like those moments where people half-smile and half-wince.”

“Use your imagination, and you'll see that even the most narrow, humdrum lives are infinite in scope if you examine them with enough care.”

“I am really interested in eccentric minds. It's rather like being fascinated by how cars work. It's really boring if your car works all the time. But as soon as something happens, you get the bonne...”

“I like poetry when I don't quite understand why I like it. Poetry isn't just a question of wrapping something up and giving it to someone else to unwrap. It just doesn't work like that.”

“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 bec...”

“Melissa popped open the clattery little Rotring tin. Pencils, putty rubber, scalpel. She sharpened a 3B, letting the curly shavings fall into the wicker bin, then paused for a few seconds, finding ...”

“Water purling between the rocks, weed under the surface like green hair in the wind.”

“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 go...”

“Maybe it was the heart which punished one with such exquisite accuracy.”

“After an Indian meal they went back to Jamie's flat and Tony did at least two things to him on the sofa that no one had ever done to him before then came back and them again the following evening, ...”

“It was true. There really was no limit to the ways in which you could say the wrong thing to your children. You offered an olive branch and it was the wrong olive branch at the wrong time.”

“...companionship refused is worse than loneliness.”

“...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 worri...”

“That was the problem, wasn't it? You left home. But you never did become an adult. Not really. You just fucked up in different and more complicated ways.”

“At twenty life was like wrestling an octopus. Every moment mattered. At thirty it was a walk in the country. Most of the time your mind was somewhere else. By the time you got to seventy, it was pr...”