01c. 1962 ADThat 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.Mark Haddon / quote ↗
02c. 1962 ADAt 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.Mark Haddon / quote ↗
03c. 1962 ADLots of people wrote to the magazine to say that Marilyn vos Savant was wrong, even when she explained very carefully why she was right. Of the letters she got about the problem, 92% said that she was wrong and lots of these were from mathematicians and scientists. Here are some of the things they said: 'I'm very concerned with the general public's lack of mathematical skills. Please help by confessing your error.' -Robert Sachs, Ph.D., George Mason University ... 'I am sure you will receive many letters from high school and college students. Perhaps you should keep a few addresses for future columns.' -W. Robert Smith, Ph.D., Georgia State University... 'If all those Ph.D.'s were wrong, the country would be in very serious trouble.' -Everett Harman, Ph.D., U.S. Army Research InstituteMark Haddon / quote ↗
04c. 1962 ADWhat 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 / quote ↗
05c. 1962 ADIn 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 / quote ↗
06c. 1962 ADBut in life you have to take lots of deductions 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 why you like others.Mark Haddon / quote ↗
08c. 1962 ADBecause time is not like space. And when you put something down somewhere, like a protractor or a biscuit, you can have a map in your head to tell you where you have left it, but even if you don't have a map it will still be there because a map is a representation of things that actually exist so you can find the protractor or the biscuits again. And a timetable is a map of time, except that if you don't have a timetable, time isn't there like the landing and the garden and the route to school.Mark Haddon / quote ↗
09c. 1962 ADAnd intuition is what people is what people use in life to make decisions.But logic can help you work out the right answer.Mark Haddon / quote ↗
10c. 1962 ADI 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 ↗
11c. 1962 ADI 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.Mark Haddon / quote ↗
12c. 1962 ADBut I said that you could still want something that is very unlikely to happen.Mark Haddon / quote ↗
13c. 1962 ADReading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well.Mark Haddon / quote ↗
14c. 1962 ADThings can be funny when people are uneasy. It softens them up and stops them falling asleep on the sofa. I like those moments where people half-smile and half-wince.Mark Haddon / quote ↗
15c. 1962 ADUse your imagination, and you'll see that even the most narrow, humdrum lives are infinite in scope if you examine them with enough care.Mark Haddon / quote ↗
16c. 1962 ADI am really interested in eccentric minds. It's rather like being fascinated by how cars work. It's really boring if your car works all the time. But as soon as something happens, you get the bonnet up. If someone has an abnormal or dysfunctional state of mind, you get the bonnet up.Mark Haddon / quote ↗
17c. 1962 ADI like poetry when I don't quite understand why I like it. Poetry isn't just a question of wrapping something up and giving it to someone else to unwrap. It just doesn't work like that.Mark Haddon / quote ↗
