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f16277d
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I rolled back onto the lawn and pressed my forehead to the ground again and made the noise that Father calls groaning. I make this noise when there is too much information coming into my head from the outside world. It is like when you are upset and you hold the radio against your ear and you tune it halfway between two stations so that all you get is white noise and then you turn the volume right up so that this is all can hear and then yo..
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Mark Haddon |
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a389215
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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.
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Mark Haddon |
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e2b525f
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When people die they are sometimes put into coffins, which means that they don't mix with the earth for a very long time until the wood of the coffin rots. But Mother was cremated. This means that she was put into a coffin and burned and ground up and turned into ash and smoke. I do not know what happens to the ash and I couldn't ask at the creamatorium because I didn't go to the funeral. But the smoke goes out of the chimney and into the ..
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cremation
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Mark Haddon |
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6bb3323
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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.
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life
inspirational
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Mark Haddon |
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9ed0312
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And what he meant was that maths wasn't like life because in life there are no straightforward answers in the end
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math
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Mark Haddon |
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993aab2
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Mrs. Forbes said that hating yellow and borwn is just being silly. And Siobhan said that she shouldn't say things like that and everyone has favorite colors. And Siobhan was right. But Mrs. Forbes was a bit right, too. Because it is sort of being silly. 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 i..
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Mark Haddon |
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bce3fbf
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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.
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Mark Haddon |
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521aa3f
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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.
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Mark Haddon |
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8d61461
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I see everything.
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Mark Haddon |
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8abbb6d
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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.
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Mark Haddon |
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f0335ba
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people believe in God because the world is very complicated and they think it is very unlikely that anything as complicated as a flying squirrel or the human eye or a brain could happen by chance.
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intelligent-design
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Mark Haddon |
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fcbc5e9
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A white lie is not a lie at all. It is where you tell the truth but you do not tell all of the truth. This means that everything you say is a white lie because when someone says, for example, "What do you want to do today?" you say, "I want to do painting with Mrs. Peters," but you don't say, "I want to have my lunch and I want to go to the toilet and I want to go home after school and I want to play with Toby and I want to have my supper"
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Mark Haddon |
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43ee091
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And Siobhan says people go on holidays to see new things and relax, but it wouldn't make me relaxed and you can see new things by looking at earth under a microscope or drawing the shape of the solid made when 3 circular rods of equal thickness intersect at right angles. And I think that there are so many things just in one house that it would take years to think about all of them properly. And also, a thing is interesting because of thinki..
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interesting
vacation
new
thinking
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Mark Haddon |
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0c9a195
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I think she cared more for that bloody dog than for me, for us. And maybe that's not so stupid, looking back... maybe it is easier living on your own looking after some stupid mutt than sharing your life with other actual human beings.
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dogs
relationships
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Mark Haddon |
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328eaa4
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I cared about dogs because they were faithful and honest, and some dogs were cleverer and more interesting than some people.
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Mark Haddon |
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46dde9f
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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. I'm meant to say that they have learning difficulties or that they have special needs. But this is stupid because everyone has learning difficulties because learning to speak French or understanding relativity is difficult and also everyone has special needs, like Father, who has to carry a little packet of artificial..
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Mark Haddon |
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335e940
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Also I didn't habe 20/20 vision whch you needed to be a pilot. But I said you could still want something that is very unlikely to happen.
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truth
astronaut
autism
belief
wishes
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Mark Haddon |
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092f689
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Miaow Consider me. I sit here like Tiberius, inscrutable and grand. I will let "I dare not" wait upon "I would" and bear the twangling of your small guitar because you are my owl and foster me with milk. Why wet my paw? Just keep me in a bag and no one knows the truth. I am familiar with witches and stand a better chance in hell than you for I can dance on hot bricks, leap your height and land on all fours. I am the servant of the Living Go..
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poetry
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Mark Haddon |
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47b7765
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One person looks around and sees a universe created by a god who watches over its long unfurling, marking the fall of sparrows and listening to the prayers of his finest creation. Another person believes that life, in all its baroque complexity, is a chemical aberration that will briefly decorate the surface of a ball of rock spinning somewhere among a billion galaxies. And the two of them could talk for hours and find no great difference b..
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Mark Haddon |
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dbcfc66
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Also people think they're not computers because they have feelings and computers don't have feelings. But feeling are just having a picture on the screen in your head of what is going to happen tomorrow or next year, or what might have happened instead of what did happened, and if it is a happy picture they smile and if it is a sad picture they cry.
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Mark Haddon |
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8da169d
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a rhetorical question. It has a question mark at the end, but you are not meant to answer it because the person who is asking it already knows the answer.
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Mark Haddon |
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df21393
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It wasn't about believing this or that, it wasn't even about good and evil and right and wrong, it was about finding the strength to bear the discomfort that came with being in the world.
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strength-through-adversity
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Mark Haddon |
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71c44c1
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I said that I wasn't clever. I was just noticing how things were, and that wasn't clever. That was just being observant.
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Mark Haddon |
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6f96dd8
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I will get a First Class Honors degree and I will become a scientist... And I know I can do this because I went to London on my own, and because I solved the mystery of Who Killed Wellington? and I found my mother and I was brave and I wrote a book and that means I can do anything.
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inspirational
self-confidence
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Mark Haddon |
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c686ce9
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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 probably like watching snooker on the telly.
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life
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Mark Haddon |
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4f759a2
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And this means that time is a mystery, and 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 is not a thing. And this is why I like timetables, because they make sure you don't get lost in time
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Mark Haddon |
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859af0d
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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 your life it is nice to think that they are what is called negligible, ..
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Mark Haddon |
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98628f3
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Siobhan said that when you are writing a book you have to include some descriptions of things. I said that I could take photographs and put them in the book. But she said the idea of a book was to describe things using words so that people could read them and make a picture in their own head.
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writing
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Mark Haddon |
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a892c58
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and only sticks and stones can break my bones.
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Mark Haddon |
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f58fedb
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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.
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Mark Haddon |
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d8f1b73
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The rule for working out prime numbers is very simple, but no one has ever worked out a simple formula for telling you whether a very big number is a prime number or what the next one will be. [...] Prime numbers is 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.
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rules-of-life
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Mark Haddon |
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0e61be9
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Well, we're meant to be writing stories today,
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Mark Haddon |
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bd2df9f
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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.
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growing-up
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Mark Haddon |
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f915630
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You could ask for hugs if you were feeling sad or you'd hurt yourself, but when it happened spontaneously it made you feel warm inside.
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Mark Haddon |
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7ac59e5
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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 to hurt.
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Mark Haddon |
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f4f76c1
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The secret of contentment lay in ignoring many things completely.
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Mark Haddon |
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9df47fd
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a simile is not a lie, unless it is a bad simile.
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simile
rhetoric
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Mark Haddon (Author) |
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29f34ef
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He had always rather liked emergencies. Other people's at any rate. They put your own problems into perspective. It was like being on a ferry. You didn't have to think about what you had to do or where you had to go for the next few hours. It was all laid out for you.
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Mark Haddon |
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257cf93
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He really did not care whether he survived or not, so long as it rendered him unconscious and absolved him of responsibility.
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Mark Haddon |
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489a970
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He'd tried celibacy. The only problem was the lack of sex.
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Mark Haddon |
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e54470f
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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.
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Mark Haddon |
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d62ee65
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That was what it meant, didn't it. Being good. You didn't have to sink wells in Burkina Faso. You didn't have to give away your coffee table. You just had to see things from other people's point of view. Remember they were human.
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Mark Haddon |
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aaa7a26
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And it means that sometimes thing are so complicated that it is impossible to predict what they are going to do next, but they are only obeying really simple rules.
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Mark Haddon |
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07c1642
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No more things should be presumed to exist than are absolutely necessary
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simple-truth
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Mark Haddon |