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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. So It Is Good To Have A Reason Why You Hate Some Things And You Like Others.

-Mark Haddon

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But In Life You

Mark Haddon

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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. So It Is Good To Have A Reason Why You Hate Some Things And You Like Others.

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..and Only Sticks And Stones Can Break My Bones.

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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.

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But I Said That You Could Still Want Something That Is Very Unlikely To Happen.

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It Wasn't About Believing This Or That, It Wasn't Even About Good And Evil And Right And Wrong, It Was About Finding The Strength To Bear The Discomfort That Came With Being In The World.

At Teenage Parties He Was Always Wandering Into The Garden, Sitting On A Bench In The Dark . . . Staring Up At The Constellations And Pondering All Those Big Questions About The Existence Of God And The Nature Of Evil And The Mystery Of Death, Questions Which Seemed More Important Than Anything Else In The Would Until A Few Years Passed And Some Real Questions Had Been Dumped Into Your Lap, Like How To Earn A Living, And Why People Fell In And Out Of Love, And How Long You Could Carry On Smoking And Then Give Up Without Getting Lung Cancer.

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Every Life Is Narrow. Our Only Escape Is Not To Run Away, But To Learn To Love The People We Are And The World In Which We Find Ourselves.

And It Occurred To Him That There Were Two Parts To Being A Better Person. One Part Was Thinking About Other People. The Other Part Was Not Giving A Toss What Other People Thought.

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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.

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I Find People Confusing.

People Think That Alien Spaceships Would Be Solid And Made Of Metal And Have Lights All Over Them And Move Slowly Through The Sky Because That Is How We Would Build A Spaceship If We Were Able To Build One That Big. But Aliens, If They Exist, Would Probably Be Very Different From Us. They Might Look Like Big Slugs, Or Be Flat Like Reflections. Or They Might Be Bigger Than Planets. Or They Might Not Have Bodies At All. They Might Just Be Information, Like In A Computer. And Their Spaceships Might Look Like Clouds, Or Be Made Up Of Unconnected Objects Like Dust Or Leaves.

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I Could Invent Another World. I'm Not Terribly Keen On This One.

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I 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.

As A Teenager, I Was Always This Strange Mixture Of Kind Of Vice-captain Of The Rugby Team And Sensitive Artist Type The Rest Of The Time. I Was Sent Away To This Public School In The Middle Of Nowhere, And I Think We Managed To Completely Miss Out On Normal Youth Culture.

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