|
0dc2a07
|
I think 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
|
|
prime-numbers
|
Mark Haddon |
|
d8e760b
|
Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think 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.
|
|
rules-of-life
meaning-of-life
math
|
Mark Haddon |
|
a504abe
|
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 |
|
b2f928b
|
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.
|
|
silence
rain
perspective
white-noise
|
Mark Haddon |
|
79050dd
|
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.
|
|
fear-of-death
|
Mark Haddon |
|
70ea7cd
|
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.
|
|
stupidity
|
Mark Haddon |
|
4a6cd48
|
I want my name to mean me.
|
|
|
Mark Haddon (Author) |
|
81f5d11
|
And when the universe has finished exploding all the stars will slow down, like a ball that has been thrown into the air, and they will come to a halt and they will all begin to fall towards the centre of the universe again. And then there will be nothing to stop us seeing all the stars in the world because they will all be moving towards us, gradually faster and faster, and we will know that the world is going to end soon because when we l..
|
|
incorrect
|
Mark Haddon |
|
a552307
|
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 |
|
18cdbb5
|
And when you look at the sky you know you are looking at stars which are hundreds and thousands of light-years away from you. And some of the stars don't even exist anymore because their light has taken so long to get to us that they are already dead, or they have exploded and collapsed into red dwarfs. And that makes you seem very small, and if you have difficult things in you life it is nice to think that they are what is called negligibl..
|
|
science
life
cosmology
|
Mark Haddon |
|
4bacdc3
|
and there was nothing to do except to wait and to hurt.
|
|
|
Mark Haddon |
|
3921ba8
|
And people who believe in God think God has put human beings on 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. Or human beings will all catch a disease and die out or they will make too much pollution and kill themselves, and then ..
|
|
evolution
god
|
Mark Haddon |
|
83fd1c1
|
Metaphors are lies.
|
|
|
Mark Haddon |
|
e905b9b
|
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.
|
|
self-confidence
|
Mark Haddon |
|
a1b3364
|
I find people confusing.
|
|
|
Mark Haddon |
|
5d32055
|
Lots of things are mysteries. But that doesn't mean there isn't an answer to them. It's just that scientists haven't found the answer yet.
|
|
mystery
the-unknown
|
Mark Haddon |
|
9033d05
|
Everyone has learning difficulties, because learning to speak French or understanding relativity is difficult.
|
|
|
Mark Haddon |
|
abb45c5
|
And it occurred to him that there were two parts to being a better person. One part was thinking about other people. The other part was not giving a toss what other people thought.
|
|
|
Mark Haddon |
|
c0281f4
|
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 |
|
494a9f9
|
A lie is when you say something happened which didn't happen. But there is only ever one thing which happened at a particular time and a particular place. And there are an infinite number of things which didn't happen at that time and that place. And if I think about something which didn't happen I start thinking about all the other things which didn't happen. For example, this morning for breakfast I had Ready Brek and some hot raspberry m..
|
|
|
Mark Haddon |
|
6103b9f
|
And because there is something they can't see people think it has to be special, because people always think there is something special about what they can't see, like the dark side of the moon, or the other side of a black hole, or in the dark when they wake up at night and they're scared.
|
|
|
Mark Haddon |
|
f62a638
|
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 |
|
287c90e
|
The word "metaphor" means carrying something from one place to another . . . and it is when you describe something by using a word for something that it isn't. This means that the word "metaphor" is a metaphor. I think it should be called a lie because a pig is not like a day and people people do not have skeletons in their cupboards. And when I try and make a picture of the phrase in my head it just confuses me because imagining and apple ..
|
|
|
Mark Haddon |
|
490ac56
|
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."
|
|
love
|
Mark Haddon |
|
5abc12b
|
and I went into the garden and lay down and looked at the stars in the sky and made myself negligible.
|
|
|
Mark Haddon |
|
65a5c6f
|
Being clever was when you looked at how things were and used the evidence to work out something new.
|
|
|
Mark Haddon |
|
1a32956
|
But I said that you could still want something that is very unlikely to happen.
|
|
|
Mark Haddon |
|
0f66d34
|
What they failed to teach you at school was that the whole business of being human just got messier and more complicated as you got older. You could tell the truth, be polite, take everyone's feelings into consideration and still have to deal with other people's shit. At nine or ninety.
|
|
|
Mark Haddon |
|
36f7ab0
|
And it's best if you know a good thing is going to happen, like an eclipse or getting a microscope for Christmas. And it's bad if you know a bad thing is going to happen, like having a filling or going to France. But I think it is worst if you don't know whether it is a good thing or a bad thing which is going to happen.
|
|
|
Mark Haddon |
|
6c5ed6b
|
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 |
|
7654975
|
And this shows that sometimes people want to be stupid and they do not want to know the truth.
|
|
stupidity
intelligence
truth
|
Mark Haddon |
|
dcdbfbf
|
You love someone, you've got to let something go.
|
|
|
Mark Haddon |
|
26749f6
|
I like it when it rains hard. It sounds like white noise everywhere, which is like silence but not empty.
|
|
|
Mark Haddon |
|
a7113f2
|
People think that alien spaceships would be solid and made of metal and have lights all over them and move slowly through the sky because that is how we would build a spaceship if we were able to build one that big. But aliens, if they exist, would probably be very different from us. They might look like big slugs, or be flat like reflections. Or they might be bigger than planets. Or they might not have bodies at all. They might just be inf..
|
|
|
Mark Haddon |
|
6f800dc
|
I do not like strangers because I do not like people I have never met before. They are hard to understand.
|
|
|
Mark Haddon |
|
4a538ae
|
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 |
|
ba7c864
|
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 |
|
1fae920
|
What actually happens when you die is that your brain stops working and your body rots, like Rabbit did when he died and we buried him in the earth at the bottom of the garden. And all his molecules were broken down into other molecules and they went into the earth and were eaten by worms and went into the plants and if we go and dig in the same place in 10 years there will be nothing exept his skeleton left. And in 1,000 years even his ske..
|
|
|
Mark Haddon |
|
552a84a
|
Mother used to say it meant Christopher was a nice name because it was a story about being kind and helpful, but I do not want my name to mean a story about being kind and helpful. I want my name to mean me.
|
|
|
Mark Haddon |
|
8ccb2b2
|
Usually people look at you when they're talking to you. I know that they're working out what I'm thinking, but I can't tell what they're thinking. It is like being in a room with a one-way mirror in a spy film.
|
|
|
Mark Haddon |
|
c6037e0
|
He was asking too many questions and he was asking them too quickly. They were stacking up in my head like loaves in the factory where Uncle Terry works. The factory is a bakery and he operates the slicing machines. And sometimes a slicer is not working fast enough but the bread keeps coming and there is a blockage. I sometimes think of my mind as a machine, but not always as a bread-slicing machine. It makes it easier to explain to other p..
|
|
|
Mark Haddon |
|
24b92d4
|
Between the roof of the shed and the big plant that hangs over the fence from the house next door I could see the constellation Orion. People say that Orion is called Orion because Orion was a hunter and the constellation looks like a hunter with a club and a bow and arrow, like this: But this is really silly because it is just stars, and you could join up the dots in any way you wanted, and you could make it look like a lady with an umbrel..
|
|
|
Mark Haddon |
|
d4e4d5e
|
And this shows that people want to be stupid and they do not want to know the truth. And it shows that something called Occam's razor is true. And Occam's razor is not a razor that men shave with but a Law, and it says: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. Which is Latin and it means: No more things should be presumed to exist than are absolutely necessary. Which means that a murder victim is usually killed by someone known t..
|
|
|
Mark Haddon |
|
02ed548
|
why I like timetables, because they make sure I don't get lost in time.
|
|
time
|
Mark Haddon |