Quotes from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“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”
― Mark Haddon, quote from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“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.”
― Mark Haddon, quote from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“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, quote from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“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, quote from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“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, quote from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“I want my name to mean me.”
― Mark Haddon, quote from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“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 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, quote from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.”
― Mark Haddon, quote from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“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, quote from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“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 negligible, which means they are so small you don’t have to take them into account when you are calculating something.”
― Mark Haddon, quote from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“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 there will only be insects in the world and they will be the best animal.”
― Mark Haddon, quote from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“...and there was nothing to do except to wait and to hurt.”
― Mark Haddon, quote from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“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, quote from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“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.”
― Mark Haddon, quote from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“Everyone has learning difficulties, because learning to speak French or understanding relativity is difficult.”
― Mark Haddon, quote from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“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, quote from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“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 milkshake. But if I say that I actually had Shreddies and a mug of tea I start thinking about Coco-Pops and lemonade and Porridge and Dr Pepper and how I wasn't eating my breakfast in Egypt and there wasn't a rhinoceros in the room and Father wasn't wearing a diving suit and so on and even writing this makes me feel shaky and scared, like I do when I'm standing on the top of a very tall building and there are thousands of houses and cars and people below me and my head is so full of all these things that I'm afraid that I'm going to forget to stand up straight and hang onto the rail and I'm going to fall over and be killed.
This is another reason why I don't like proper novels, because they are lies about things which didn't happen and they make me feel shaky and scared.
And this is why everything I have written here is true.”
― Mark Haddon, quote from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“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, quote from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“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, quote from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“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 in someone's eye doesn't have anything to do with liking someone a lot and it makes you forget what the person was talking about. ”
― Mark Haddon, quote from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“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, quote from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“Being clever was when you looked at how things were and used the evidence to work out something new.”
― Mark Haddon, quote from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“...and I went into the garden and lay down and looked at the stars in the sky and made myself negligible.”
― Mark Haddon, quote from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“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, quote from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“But I said that you could still want something that is very unlikely to happen.”
― Mark Haddon, quote from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“Siobhan says that if you raise one eyebrow it can means lots of different things. It can mean 'I want to do sex with you' and it can also mean 'I think what you just said was very stupid.”
― Mark Haddon, quote from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“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, quote from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

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“تصورتُ أنّ قلبي تلفّت في صدري, التفاتة القلب هذه التي تحدث كلّما وقعنا على الأكيد, على ما ليس منه بد, القريب جداً بالنسبة للبعد الذي تصورناه به”
― Camilo José Cela, quote from The Family of Pascual Duarte

“I already read everything. I read poems and plays and novels and newspapers and comic books and magazines. I read tins in supermarkets and leaflets that come through the door, unsolicited mail. None of it lasts long and it doesn't give me answers. Reading too fast is not soothing.”
― Janice Galloway, quote from The Trick is to Keep Breathing

“I used to be endlessly troubled by meat-eating people who were uneasy with hunters and hunting. ... How can someone suggest that paying for the slaughter of animals is more justifiable than taking the responsibility for one's food into one's own hands? ... Civilization is a mechanism that allows us to avoid the necessary but ugly aspects of life; most of us do not euthanize our own pets, we don't unplug the life support on our own ailing grandparents, we don't repair our own cars, and we don't process our own raw sewage. Instead, the delegations of our less-pleasant responsibilities is so widespread that taking these things on is almost like trying to swim upriver. It's easier not to do them, and those who insist on doing so are bound to look a little odd.”
― quote from American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon

“You see, the human creature is prone to legalism. There is nothing the devil likes more than to impose a set of legalistic rules on a person. Then when that person has a hard time keeping those rules, his confidence that God will move in his life is greatly shaken.”
― quote from The Walk of the Spirit - The Walk of Power : The Vital Role of Praying in Tongues

“I saw a stop sign, and it occurred to me that just as no one expects a stop sign to stop a car, I shouldn’t expect words to substitute for experience. That’s not their job, although words certainly can be misused in that way. The job of words is to direct us toward experience, to round out experience, to facilitate experience, and to give us ways to share at least pale shadows of that experience with those we love. And the job of words is to help us learn to be — and act — human.”
― Derrick Jensen, quote from Walking on Water: Reading, Writing, and Revolution

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