Autism Quotes

“You may have different needs
than some folks in your class,
but that doesn't make you the ­«wrong» version
and other people the «normal» version.
You are Selah.
And you are not the only one
feeling these things.”
― Meg Eden Kuyatt, Good Different

“I may be forced to mask, but they choose to wear numerous faces.”
― Elle McNicoll, Keedie

“The shrieking and cackling of other students makes me flinch and dart around them, like a fish on the reef trying to avoid barracudas. Their volume and their nearness is completely undeliberate, they don't know what it's doing to me, but it feels cruel. It feels like they're doing it on purpose.”
― Elle McNicoll, Keedie

“Maybe I'm not overthinking it. Maybe I've been told I'm overthinking it so often, by so many people, I've convinced myself it's all I'm capable of. But what if they're wrong? What if I'm thinking it exactly the right amount? What if everyone else is simply underthinking it, continuously, and the deficit is actually theirs? Because something tells me I'm not in the wrong here: my instincts are spot-on.”
― Holly Smale, Cassandra in Reverse

“I do know what came over me. It's exactly what always comes over me when someone breaks rules, no matter how totally arbitrary they seem to be. Something in my brain snaps, and I detonate like a hand grenade. Which is incredibly hypocritical, given how happy I am to ignore rules if I don't personally agree with them.”
― Holly Smale, Cassandra in Reverse

“I mean, we should probably have worked it out for ourselves, what with the lifelong obsession with Greek mythology and the rules and regulations and the need for quiet, dark rooms and the same restaurant and food over and over again and the sensory issues and the repetitive movements and the massive meltdowns, but we all just thought she was your bog-standard academic.”
― Holly Smale, Cassandra in Reverse

“It's 2022 as I write this and I'm still waiting to find someone I respect to speak openly and in detail about meltdowns. I'm really annoyed that I have to be the one to do this.”
― Fern Brady, Strong Female Character

“As the school year progressed, my learning window would get smaller, and smaller, and by the year’s end, it would be closed tight by morning break, if it opened at all. This had always been the case, but in primary school I had a chance of keeping up because there were significantly fewer variables in my day. High school in comparison was a cluster-fuck of environmental shapeshifting, with no day ever looking the same as the one before, and as you’ve probably picked up by now, change was not my friend anymore than my classmates were”
― Hannah Gadsby, Ten Steps to Nanette

“Sounds have always had the ability to make me feel things; audible chewing elicits anger, loud noises can bring on sudden anxiety, and high-pitched sounds resonate in my spine with something akin to physical pain. It’s not all bad, a satisfying key-change in a song brings on all the sensations of cresting on a rollercoaster, but stripped of the terror. It’s lovely. But a lot of noises all at once, even if they are exclusively pleasant sounds, will always feel like an assault, so the relentless cacophony of high school was constantly unbearably overwhelming”
― Hannah Gadsby, Ten Steps to Nanette

“I’ve been trying to motivate myself to have a shower for the last forty-five minutes, but so far all I’ve managed to do is get my underwear out of the drawer and lie back down on the bed. Having a shower isn’t just having a shower. It’s picking out what I’m going to wear, getting undressed, turning the taps, washing my hair, turning off the taps, drying my hair, drying my body, getting dressed and getting ready to leave the house. It’s too many steps.”
― Kay Kerr, Social Queue

“And obviously my answer is no. My answer is: I have never in my entire life been free tonight, because if we haven't arranged it days in advance and I haven't spent the day mentally preparing myself for social interaction, I am not coming.

Your poorly arranged plans are of no interest to me.”
― Holly Smale, Cassandra in Reverse

“I've been trying to be like everybody else for the last thirty-one years. If it was possible, I think I'd have done it already.”
― Holly Smale, Cassandra in Reverse

“Will's brown eyes are suddenly trained on me.

Stiffening, I stay as still as I can and attempt to look like a person who cannot feel themselves being studied like a bug in a jar. I'm being a normal human, right? This is how people sit, isn't it? Am I jittering, rocking, bouncing, clawing? Has Will noticed that I'm just copying his body language and facial expressions, or is he thinking how pretty I look in the sun? Does he like me, or is he faintly creeped out by me? Is he interested, or bored? Is he considering kissing me, or wondering why I look like I've only been given this body recently and still have no idea how to drive it?

("Cassandra seems to believe she might be an alien.")

It's all a complete mystery.

All I know is the longer he studies me, the more confused I become. Also, the sheer effort of not accidentally playing piano fingers on my ice cream is exhausting: it feels like I'm fighting the Colchian dragon and hoping nobody will notice.”
― Holly Smale, Cassandra in Reverse

“So when Barry accused me of not being a People Person, he wasn't wrong.

Sometimes I barely feel like a person, singular.”
― Holly Smale, Cassandra in Reverse

“I return myself to the safety of my bedroom and throw myself into a loop of my own making: read a book I've already read, watch a TV show I've seen dozens of times, wear my Wednesday pajamas and eat my Wednesday dinner. I listen to a favorite song on repeat, dozens of times; bury myself in familiarity like a small, hurt animal in its den, turning in tiny circles until it can comfortably settle. I make the same small sounds to myself, over and over again. I curl up in a ball on my bed, rocking gently, losing myself in the comfort of a pattern.
I soothe myself with repetition until I feel calm.”
― Holly Smale, Cassandra in Reverse

“Not everyone is like me: that much is painfully clear.”
― Holly Smale, Cassandra in Reverse

“Not everyone obsesses, analyzes, struggles to let go and move on. Not everyone holds on to every single social interaction with their fingertips in terror, as if dangling off a cliff's edge.”
― Holly Smale, Cassandra in Reverse

“But I find being around people so hard. Any people. There's all this noise and light and color and sensation, all the time, and I don't know how to read tone or emotions or jokes or sarcasm or flirting. It's like all the things that everyone else can do automatically, I have to do manually. And I get overwhelmed. Constantly. That's the face you're seeing. It's me, trying to process everything at once.”
― Holly Smale, Cassandra in Reverse

“I think about this offer carefully for a few seconds. Strangers, packed together in a loud, flashing room in scratchy clothes, making pointless small talk, eating food I don't like from plates that might not be properly clean, using cutlery with little bits of dried food still stuck to it. Intermittently dancing. Yeah: if Hades ever dragged me to the Underworld, that's exactly what I'd find there.”
― Holly Smale, Cassandra in Reverse

“I realize that's how it sometimes feels to be me.
As if I have to hide who I am, all of the time.
As if I have to pretend to be like everyone else, just so people will love me.
As if I'm constantly being asked to share, to reveal myself, to open up, and when I do--when I finally show people who I truly am--it's not what anyone wanted and they explode right in front of me.
I am so fucking done with making myself smaller.”
― Holly Smale, Cassandra in Reverse

“I'm on the spectrum," I say with a jolt. "Derek and Jack were right."
"They were not." Artemis scowls. "That's a euphemism. They don't want to say autistic because they think it's rude. It is not rude."
"It's not?" I say distantly, observing my brain shift again.
"Nope. People think autism is some kind of error, and it's not. You're not broken or 'disordered,' or whatever they say on their little bits of paper. That just means 'not exactly like me.' Which--" Artemis points at the folder "--I think you'll see is one of the many things Mum wrote in the margins, along with the words go to hell, highlighted in pink. Autism is just a different wiring. You're built in alternative neurological software, from the ground up. Every single part of you. And it's..."
"Colorful and loud?" I guess, and Artemis laughs.
"I was going to say brilliant," she says. "But, yeah, I'd imagine that too. Although I don't know why anyone is surprised at how the world treats you. This has never really been a planet that embraces difference.”
― Holly Smale, Cassandra in Reverse

“I should be more surprised. I should be reeling. But isn't this exactly how I've always felt? That I'm not quite made the same? That I'm some kind of alien, trying to learn how to be a human from scratch every day? That I constantly need to translate the world around me to myself, and then myself back to the world again, like speaking two completely different languages simultaneously?
Wow. No wonder I'm always so bloody exhausted.”
― Holly Smale, Cassandra in Reverse

“This book does not represent autism, and neither I nor Cassie represent autistic people. We are simply individual voices in a choir of millions of amazing neurodivergent people, all with our own experiences, or own ways of seeing the world, our own ways of existing. I cannot speak for anyone but myself, and I would not want to try. So, whether you enjoyed this book or not, whether you see yourself represented in this story or not, I urge you to seek out other autistic voices.
We are beautiful, we are unique, and we are legion.”
― Holly Smale, Cassandra in Reverse

“We push off the ground and break into a run. It is not a race, it’s just running. All we need to do is simply feel our bodies splitting the air.”
― Sohn Won-Pyung

“It really is something when you can make collecting and organising objects boring to a young kid with autism spectrum disorder (but that’s exactly what Stamp Explorer managed to do).”
― Hannah Gadsby, Ten Steps to Nanette

“I was no longer making an effort at school. I didn’t decide to become lazy on a whim born of a bad attitude, I was tired. I was tired of all my earnest and concentrated scholastic efforts being met with not just dwindling grades, but also my teachers’ lowering estimation of me. My report cards were almost exclusively filled with sentiments like, ‘Hannah does not apply herself’, or ‘Hannah is falling well short of her potential’, sometimes the sentiments were more bluntly expressed. ‘Hannah is lazy’, or ‘had a bad attitude’. Sometimes they were contained within genuinely insightful observations and far more interesting language, ‘Hannah’s participation in class is spasmodic’, or, ‘Hannah brings a rather ethereal presence to class discussions’. The truth is none of my teachers seemed to notice how hard I was trying. Instead they would invariably conclude that laziness, mine, was the root cause of the ever-widening gap between my perceived intelligence, and my poor results. None of my teachers were inclined to wonder if it was their teaching methods that were falling short”
― Hannah Gadsby, Ten Steps to Nanette

“The main stumbling block to succeeding at school was how difficult I found it to do the learning in class. Halfway through a lesson, my brain would just switch off. ‘Nope, I’ve had enough. I don’t want to do it anymore’. It wasn’t melodramatic about it, it would just hit its threshold and shut down, leaving me helpless to take in new information”
― Hannah Gadsby, Ten Steps to Nanette

“The other hurdle high school threw at me was homework. I’m not morally opposed to extra-curricular curricular, I just didn’t have time for it. As in primary school, I needed my evenings to catch up on things my brain had been unable to take on board during the day, not to mention recover from the sheer exhaustion of trying to subtly navigate a sea of hypercritical teens for hours on end”
― Hannah Gadsby, Ten Steps to Nanette

“But for the outcasts like me, the ones who don't fit the box, the only words that remind me I'm human are my own.”
― Heather Day Gilbert, Queen of Hearts

“Given what we now understand about the fundamental processes underlying AI, you can't get out of Flatland by simply building an infinite number of two-dimensional ladders infinitely fast. They will move faster and more competently within the boundaries of linear rationality than any human is capable of. But they will always be bound within the confines of that map.”
― Dr. Maureen Dunne, Author, The Neurodiversity Edge