Quotes from Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant

Daniel Tammet ·  226 pages

Rating: (16.8K votes)


“You don't have to be disabled to be different, because everybody's different.”
― Daniel Tammet, quote from Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant


“Why learn a number like pi to so many decimal places? The answer I gave then as I do now is that pi is for me an extremely beautiful and utterly unique thing. Like the Mona Lisa or a Mozart symphony, pi is its own reason for loving it.”
― Daniel Tammet, quote from Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant


“No relationship is without its difficulties and this is certainly true when one or both of the persons involved has an autistic spectrum disorder. Even so, I believe what is truly essential to the success of any relationship is not so much compatibility, but love. When you love someone, virtually anything is possible.”
― Daniel Tammet, quote from Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant


“I had eventually come to understand that friendship was a delicate, gradual process that mustn’t be rushed or seized upon but allowed and encouraged to take its course over time. I pictured it as a butterfly, simultaneously beautiful and fragile, that once afloat belonged to the air and any attempt to grab at it would only destroy it.”
― Daniel Tammet, quote from Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant


“Like many parents, they equated normality with being happy and productive.”
― Daniel Tammet, quote from Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant



“Professor Ramachandran believes this synesthetic connection between our hearing and seeing senses was an important first step towards the creation of words in early humans. According to this theory, our ancestors would have begun to talk by using sounds that evoked the object they wanted to describe. For example, words referring to something small often involve making a synesthetic small i sound with the lips and a narrowing of the vocal tracts: Little, teeny, petite, whereas the opposite is true of words denoting something large or enormous. If the theory is right, then language emerged from the vast array of synesthetic connections in the human brain.”
― Daniel Tammet, quote from Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant


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About the author

Daniel Tammet
Born place: in London, The United Kingdom
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