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

“..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, 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. 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 sweetening tablets around with him to put in his coffee to stop him from getting fat, or Mrs. Peters, who wears a beige-colored hearing aid, or Siobhan, who has glasses so thick that they give you a headache if you borrow them, and none of these people are Special Needs, even if they have special needs.

But Siobhan said we have to use those words because people used to call children like the children at school spaz and crip and mong, which were nasty words. But that is stupid too because sometimes the children from the school down the road see us in the street when we're getting off the bus and they shout, "Special Needs! Special Needs!" But I don't take any notice because I don't listen to what other people say and only sticks and stones can break my bones and I have a Swiss Army knife if they hit me and if I kill them it will be self-defense and I won't go to prison.”
― Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

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

“Also I didn't have 20/20 vision which you needed to be a pilot. But I said you could still want something that is very unlikely to happen.”
― Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

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

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

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

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

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

“No more things should be presumed to exist than are absolutely necessary”
― Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“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 dig in the same place in 10 years there will be nothing except his skeleton left. And in 1,000 years even his skeleton will be gone. But that is all right because he is part of the flowers and the apple tree and the hawthorn bush now.
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 burnt 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 crematorium because I didn't go to the funeral. But the smoke goes out of the chimney and into the air and sometimes I look up into the sky and I think that there are molecules of Mother up there, or in clouds over Africa or the Antartic, or coming down as rain in rainforests in Brazil, or in snow somewhere.”
― Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

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

“Time is only the relationship between the different things changing”
― Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“Well, we're meant to be writing stories today,”
― Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“..and only sticks and stones can break my bones.”
― Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

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

“And it is funny because economists are not real scientists, and because logicians think more clearly, but mathematicians are best.”
― Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

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

“And people who believe in God think God has put human beings on the 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.”
― Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“But 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 don't really know we are sad. So we say we aren't sad. But really we are.”
― Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“I cooked his meals. I cleaned his clothes. I looked after him every weekend. I look after him when he was ill. I took him to the doctor. I worried myself sick everytime he wandered off somewhere at night. I went to school every time he got into a fight. And you? What? You wrote him some fucking letters.”
― Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“Prime numbers are useful for writing codes and in America they are classed as Military Material and if you find one over 100 digits you have to tell the CIA and they buy it off you for $10,000. But it would not be a very good way of making a living.”
― Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“Lots of things are mystries. 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, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“.. a simile is not a lie, unless it is a bad simile.”
― Mark Haddon (Author), The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“I did know what it meant when you say you promise something. You have to say that you will never do something again and then you must never do it because that would make the promise a lie.”
― Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“MR JEAVONS SAID THAT I liked maths because it was safe. He said I liked maths because it meant solving problems, and these problems were difficult and interesting, but there was always a straightforward answer at the end. And what he meant was that maths wasn’t like life because in life there are no straightforward answers at the end. I know he meant this because this is what he said. This is because Mr Jeavons doesn’t understand numbers. Here”
― Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“And that is why a dog can go to the vet and have a really big operation and have metal pins sticking out of its leg but if it sees a cat it forgets that it has pins sticking out of its leg and chases after the cat. But when a person has an operation it has a picture in its head of the hurt carrying on for months and months. And it has a picture of all the stitches in its leg and the broken bone and the pins and even if it sees a bus it has to catch it doesn't run because it has a picture in its head of the bones crunching together and the stitches breaking and even more pain.”
― Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“Eventually scientists will discover something that explains ghosts, just like they discovered electricity, which explained lightning, and it might be something about people’s brains, or something about the earth’s magnetic field, or it might be some new force altogether. And then ghosts won’t be mysteries. They will be like electricity and rainbows and nonstick frying pans.”
― Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“I find people confusing.

This is for two main reasons.

The first main reason is that people do a lot of talking without using any words. Siobhan says that if you raise one eyebrow it can mean lots of different things. It can mean "I want to do sex with you" and it can also mean "I think that what you just said was very stupid."

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 said just before and hundreds of other things which are too complicated to work out in a few seconds.

The second main reason is that people often talk using metaphors. These are examples of metaphors

I laughed my socks off.
He was the apple of her eye.
They had a skeleton in the cupboard.
We had a real pig of a day.
The dog was stone dead.

The word metaphor means carrying something from one place to another, and it comes from the Greek words meta (which means from one place to another) and ferein (which means to carry), 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 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 an 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, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“And when I am in a new place, because I see everything, it is like when a computer is doing too many things at the same time and the central processor unit is blocked up and there isn't any space left to think about other things. And when I am in a new place and there are lots of people there it is even harder because people are not like cows and flowers and grass and they can talk to you and do things that you don't expect, so you have to notice everything that is in the place, and also you have to notice things that might happen as well. And sometimes when I am in a new place and there are lots of people there it is like a computer crashing and I have to close my eyes and put my hands over my ears and groan, which is like pressing CTRL + ALT + DEL and shutting down programs and turning the computer off and rebooting so that I can remember what I am doing and where I am meant to be going.”
― Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time