Home > Work > The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
61 " 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. "
― Mark Haddon , The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
62 " 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. "
63 " I see everything. "
64 " ..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. "
65 " 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 "
66 " I cared about dogs because they were faithful and honest, and some dogs were cleverer and more interesting than some people. "
67 " 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. "
68 " ... 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. "
69 " I said that I wasn’t clever. I was just noticing how things were, and that wasn’t clever. That was just being observant. "
70 " 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 "
71 " 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. "
72 " ..and only sticks and stones can break my bones. "
73 " 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. "
74 " 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. "
75 " Well, we're meant to be writing stories today, "
76 " ...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. "
77 " .. a simile is not a lie, unless it is a bad simile. "
78 " 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. "
79 " 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. "
80 " And it is funny because economists are not real scientists, and because logicians think more clearly, but mathematicians are best. "