Autism Quotes

“Through the blur, I wondered if I was alone or if other parents felt the same way I did - that everything involving our children was painful in some way. The emotions, whether they were joy, sorrow, love or pride, were so deep and sharp that in the end they left you raw, exposed and yes, in pain. The human heart was not designed to beat outside the human body and yet, each child represented just that - a parent's heart bared, beating forever outside its chest.”
― Debra Ginsberg

“Obsessions are the only things that matter.”
― Patricia Highsmith

“What would happen if the autism gene was eliminated from the gene pool?

You would have a bunch of people standing around in a cave, chatting and socializing and not getting anything done.”
― Temple Grandin, The Way I See It: A Personal Look at Autism & Asperger's

“You have to be the bravest person in the world to go out every day, being yourself when no one likes who you are.”
― Matthew Dicks, Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend

“On the other hand, I think cats have Asperger's. Like me, they're very smart. And like me, sometimes they simply need to be left alone.”
― Jodi Picoult, House Rules

“If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

“She didn’t know how to be semi-interested in something. She was either indifferent . . . or obsessed.”
― Helen Hoang, The Kiss Quotient

“Autists are the ultimate square pegs, and the problem with pounding a square peg into a round hole is not that the hammering is hard work. It's that you're destroying the peg.”
― Paul Collins

“This crusade to fix herself was ending right now. She wasn't broken. She saw and interacted with the world in a different way, but that was her. She could change her actions, change her words, change her appearance, but she couldn't change the root of herself. At her core, she would always be autistic. People called it a disorder, but it didn't feel like one. To her, it was simply the way she was.”
― Helen Hoang, The Kiss Quotient

“You know, everybody's ignorant, just on different subjects.”
― Will Rogers

“Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

“I don’t want my thoughts to die with me, I want to have done something. I’m not interested in power, or piles of money. I want to leave something behind. I want to make a positive contribution - know that my life has meaning.”
― Temple Grandin

“Hi Hazel Well here I am in the office and it’s dead quiet. What I’ll do is email pics of some of the stuff in the files and the comments with them. This is exactly what you wanted – stuff about the Games people played together with comments people made. Perfect!”
― Elizabeth Tebby Germaine, A MAN WHO SEEMED REAL: A story of love, lies, fear and kindness

“The best way to measure the loss of intellectual sophistication - this "nerdification," to put it bluntly - is in the growing disappearance of sarcasm, as mechanic minds take insults a bit too literally.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

“If I could snap my fingers and be nonautistic, I would not. Autism is part of what I am.”
― Temple Grandin

“If they can't learn the way we teach, we teach the way they learn”
― O. Ivar Lovaas

“Think of it: a disability is usually defined in terms of what is missing. … But autism … is as much about what is abundant as what is missing, an over-expression of the very traits that make our species unique.”
― Paul Collins, Not Even Wrong: Adventures in Autism

“Go to the edge of the cliff and jump off. Build your wings on the way down.--Ray Bradbury”
― T.K. Thorne

“She had a disorder, but it didn’t define her. She was Stella. She was a unique person.”
― Helen Hoang, The Kiss Quotient

“A person with autism lives in his own world, while a person with Asperger's lives in our world, in a way of his own choosing”
― Nicholas Sparks, Dear John

“Autism, is part of my child, it's not everything he is. My child is so much more than a diagnosis.”
― Sandra L Westendorf-Coelho, The World According to August - One Good Friend

“But the Beast was a good person...the Prince looked on the outside the way the Beast was on the inside. Sometimes people couldn't see the inside of the person unless they like the outside of a person. Because they hadn't learned to hear the music yet.”
― Karen Kingsbury, Unlocked

“When you see an object, it seems that you see it as an entire thing first, and only afterwards do its details follow on. But for people with autism, the details jump straight out at us first of all, and then only gradually, detail by detail, does the whole image float up into focus.”
― Naoki Higashida, The Reason I Jump: the Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism

“Refusing to perform neurotypicality is a revolutionary act of disability justice. It's also a radical act of self-love.”
― Devon Price, Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity

“There's nothing more debilitating about a disability than the way people treat you over it.”
― Solange nicole

“I've met so many parents of the kids who are on the low end of the autism spectrum, kids who are diametrically opposed to Jacob, with his Asperger's. They tell me I'm lucky to have a son who's verbal, who is blisteringly intelligent, who can take apart the broken microwave and have it working again an hour later. They think there is no greater hell than having a son who is locked in his own world, unaware that there's a wider one to explore. But try having a son who is locked in his own world and still wants to make a connection. A son who tries to be like everyone else but truly doesn't know how.”
― Jodi Picoult, House Rules

“On our own we simply don't know how to get things done the same way you do things. But, like everyone else, we want to do the best we possibly can. When we sense you've given up on us, it makes us feel miserable. So please keep helping us, through to the end.”
― Naoki Higashida, The Reason I Jump: the Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism

“I think that people with autism are born outside the regime of civilization. Sure, this is just my own made-up theory, but I think that, as a result of all the killings in the world and the selfish planet-wrecking that humanity has committed, a deep sense of crisis exists. Autism has somehow arisen out of this. Although people with autism look like other people physically, we are in fact very different in many ways. We are more like travelers from the distant, distant past. And if, by our being here, we could help the people of the world remember what truly matters for the Earth, that would give us a quiet pleasure.”
― Naoki Higashida, The Reason I Jump: the Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism

“...the reason is that when we look at nature, we receive a sort of permission to be alive in this world...”
― Naoki Higashida, The Reason I Jump: the Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism

“Q25 What's the reason you jump?
When I'm jumping it's as if my feelings are going upward to the sky. Really, my urge to be swallowed up by the sky is enough to make my heart quiver. When I'm jumping, I can feel my body parts really well, too--my bounding legs and my clapping hands--and that makes me feel so, so good.”
― Naoki Higashida, The Reason I Jump: the Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism