Nathan Filer Quotes & Sayings

What I did at the memorial, was listen.
To the laughter and the tears, and to the quiet stillness that followed. — Nathan Filer

If I look closely I can see we have the same colour eyes, not me and Simon, but me and the boy who is also me, the boy who I can no longer recognise, with whom I no longer share a single thought, worry, or hope. — Nathan Filer

Once-upon-a-time we buried the memories we didn't want. — Nathan Filer

When she turned to see me smiling. It was an awkward smile, but you only really know what a smile means when you own the face behind it. Everyone else just sees the smile they expected it to be. — Nathan Filer

You only really know what a smile means when you own the face behind it. Everyone else just sees the smile they expect it to be. — Nathan Filer

The worst thing about this illness isn't the things it makes me believe, or what it makes me do. It's not the control that it has over me, or even the control it's allowed other people to take.
Worse than all of that is how I have become selfish. — Nathan Filer

This is what labels do. They stick. If people think you're MAD, then everything you do, everything you think, will have MAD stamped across it. — Nathan Filer

Try and remember that if you can. Hold onto it through everything else that happens in life, through all the things that might make you want to forget - keep it safe somewhere. — Nathan Filer

But one thing I've learnt about people, is that they can always surprise you. — Nathan Filer

Hello, my name is your potential. But you can call me impossible. I am the missed opportunities. I am the expectations you will never fulfil. I am always taunting you, regardless of how hard you try, regardless of how much you hope. Please put talcum powder on my arse when you wash me, and take note of how our shit smells exactly the same. — Nathan Filer

I can only describe reality as I know it. I'm doing my best, and promise to keep trying. Shake on it. — Nathan Filer

Words like guilt and shame and nightmares - the kind of nightmares that drag you from sleep, and leave you reaching for something no longer there. — Nathan Filer

I should write about why he left.
But there are different versions of truth. If we meet each other in the street, glance away and look back, we might look the same, feel the same, think the same, but the subatomic particles, the smallest parts of us that make every other part, will have rushed away, been replaced at impossible speeds. We will be completely different people. Everything changes all the time.
Truth changes.
Here are three truths. — Nathan Filer

These are the moments that make the dot-to-dot pictures of our past; everything else is simply filling in the gaps. — Nathan Filer

Some things in life are exactly as we imagine. — Nathan Filer

I said that my mother is mad. I said that. But you might not see it. I mean, you might not think that anything I've told you proves she is mad. But there are different kinds of madness. Some madness doesn't act mad to begin with, sometimes it will knock politely at the door, and when you let it in, it'll simply sit in the corner without a fuss - and grow. Then one day, maybe many months after your decision to take your son out of school and isolate him in a house for reasons that got lost in your grief, one day that madness will stir in the chair, and it will say to him, 'You look pale. — Nathan Filer

Day and night flash in a strobe, seasons collide, clouds explode, candles melt onto icing sugar, a wreath rots way. The boy and his dad rush through time, thumbs pressed together.
The boy grows like a weed.
And in every moment is a world unseen - beyond balconies, outside of memory, far from the reach of understanding — Nathan Filer

Hink back through your own life, to when you were eight or nine years old. See if the memories you have are the ones you might expect. or if they are fragments, dislocated moments, a smell here, a feeling there. The unlikeliest conversations and places. We don't choose what we keep - not at that age. Not ever, really. — Nathan Filer

Reading is a bit like hallucinating. — Nathan Filer

Really, Matt. You're your own worst enemy.
That's a strange thing to say to someone with a serious mental disease. Of course I'm my own worst enemy. That's the whole problem. — Nathan Filer

Some madness doesn't act mad to begin with, sometimes it will knock politely at the door, and when you let it in, it'll simply sit in the corner without a fuss - and grow. — Nathan Filer

I don't want the world to keep turning without me on it. — Nathan Filer

Except you're not on my side, are you Steve? Because if you were on my side you just would have handed me the dictionary like a grown-up. Because if you make a big fucking gesture of it Steve, then it becomes a big fucking deal. — Nathan Filer

But sometimes all the stars in the entire universe conspire to make something good happen. — Nathan Filer

Writing about the past is a way of reliving it, a way of seeing it unfold all over again. We place memories on pieces of paper to know they will always exist. — Nathan Filer

But that is what these people do - the Steves of this world - they all try and make something out of nothing. and they all do it for themselves. — Nathan Filer

Practice what you preach — Nathan Filer

She's known sadness. That's what it is. I only just thought that as I wrote it. She's known sadness, and it has made her kind. — Nathan Filer

I guess there's a Use By date when it comes to blaming your parents for how messed up you are. — Nathan Filer

In the 1970s, a group of researchers got themselves deliberately confined to mental asylums across United States. They did this by pretending to hear voices. They pretended to hear a voice saying, Empty, Dull and Thud.
But as soon as they were admitted to the wards, they stopped pretending and never mention the voice again.
And here's the mad part
The hospital staff outright refused to believe they were better, and kept them locked up anyway - some of them for months on end -each forced into accepting they had a mental illness, and agreeing to take drugs as a condition of their release. This is what labels do. They stick. — Nathan Filer

Release. This is what labels do. They stick. If people think you're MAD, then everything you do, everything you think, will have MAD stamped across it. One of the — Nathan Filer

She would never force her company on someone, no matter how much she might want to.
Ha.
She's like a vampire. She has to be invited in. — Nathan Filer

Some memories refuse to be locked in time or place, they are always present. — Nathan Filer

A good thing about talking to someone who is standing behind you is that you can pretend you don't know they're crying, and not trouble yourself too much with working out why. You can simply concentrate on helping them feel better. — Nathan Filer

I decided each name on each spine was the person who the book had been written for, rather than who had written it. I decided everyone in the world had a book with their name on, and if I searched hard enough I'd eventually find mine. — Nathan Filer

I want to talk about the difference between living and existing, and what it was like to be kept on an acute psychiatric ward for day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day etc. — Nathan Filer

Any punishment is an insult to the crime — Nathan Filer

I think people who are generous with food have a goodness about them. — Nathan Filer

I guess children believe whatever they want to believe. Perhaps adults do too. — Nathan Filer

It's like we each have a wall that separates our dreams from reality, but mine has cracks in it. The dreams can wriggle and squeeze their way through, until it's hard to know the difference. — Nathan Filer

There is weather and there is climate.
If it rains outside, or if you stab a classmate's shoulder with a compass needle, over and over, until his white cotton school shirt looks like blotting paper; that is weather.
But if you live in a place where is is often likely to rain, or your perception falters and dislocates so that you retreat, suspicious and afraid of those closest to you, that is climate. — Nathan Filer

Mental illness turns people inwards. That's what I reckon. It keeps up forever trapped by the pain of our own minds, in the same way that the pain of a broken leg or a cut thumb will grab your attention, holding it so tightly that your good leg or your good thumb seem to cease to exist. — Nathan Filer

I nestled into the nook of Mum's arm. Then lay on a cushion on her lap. I fell asleep like that. She's all bones and hard edges. She's never been comfortable, but she's always been there. — Nathan Filer

It's hard to know what to say sometimes, when someone does something so nice. It's hard to know where to look. — Nathan Filer

I picked up a mug with the complicated name of a medication stamped across the side, and a slogan about Treating Today for Tomorrow. They're handed out to places like this by visiting drug companies. Last time I went in the office to borrow the Nursing Dictionary, I counted three mugs, a mouse mat, a bunch of pens, two Post-it note booklets and the wall clock - all sporting the brands of different medicines. It's like being in prison and having to look at adverts for fucking locks. — Nathan Filer

Inside my head is a jigsaw made of trillions and trillions and trillions of atoms. It might take a while. — Nathan Filer

I do not have a split mind. I am not different people. I am myself, the same self I have always been, the one person I can never escape. — Nathan Filer

That's a fear when someone you love dies, isn't it? Especially if you're only young when it happens, you might worry that over time you'll stop being able to picture them properly. Or that the sound of their voice will merge into other voices, so that you can no longer be sure how it was they sounded. — Nathan Filer

If we meet each other in the street, glance away and look back, we might look the same, feel the same, think the same, but the subatomic particles, the smallest parts of us that make every other part, will have rushed away, been replaced at impossible speed. We will be completely different people. Everything changes all the time. — Nathan Filer

That was sort of our family portrait. It's not the kind of thing you think you would miss. Maybe you don't even notice it at all those thousands of times, sitting between your mum and dad on the big green couch with your brother on the carpet getting in the way of the telly. Maybe you don't even notice that.
But you notice it when he isn't there anymore. You notice so many places where he isn't, and you hear so many of the things he doesn't say.
I do.
I hear them all the time. — Nathan Filer

Billions of years ago exploding stars sent atoms hurtling through space and we've been recycling them on Earth ever since. Except for the occasional comet, meteor, some interstellar dust, we've used exactly the same atoms over and over since the earth was formed. We eat them, we drink them, we breathe them, we are made of them. At this precise moment each of us is exchanging our atoms with everyone else, and not just with each other, but with other animals, trees, fungi, moulds... — Nathan Filer

Her brother has a disease, an illness with the shape and sound of a snake. It slithers through the branches of our family tree. It must have broken her heart, to know that I was next. — Nathan Filer

Some people can remember way back to the beginning of their lives. I've even met people who say they can remember being born. — Nathan Filer

We are selfish, my illness and I. We think only of ourselves. We shape the world around us into messages, into secret whispers spoken only for us. — Nathan Filer

Thinking about the past is like digging up graves — Nathan Filer

It doesn't need to be perfect,' she said at last. 'It's already wonderful. — Nathan Filer

This is how we piece together our past. We do it like a jigsaw puzzle, where there are missing pieces. But so long as we have enough of the pieces, we can know what belongs in the gaps. — Nathan Filer

Most of life isn't anything. Most of life is just the passing of time, and we're even asleep for a fair chunk of that. — Nathan Filer