Actually Autistic Quotes & Sayings

If a baby really has no awareness of himself and is totally thing-directed and at the same time all his states of mind are projected onto things, our second paradox makes sense: on the one hand, thought in babies can be viewed as pure accommodation or exploratory movements, but on the other this very same thought is only one, long, completely autistic waking dream. — Jean Piaget

The autistic personality is an extreme variant of male intelligence. — Hans Asperger

The boy's mother said he was autistic and sometimes spaced out, staring at his hands, but because I didn't know what autism was, really, I figured he was more or less mesmerized by his existence. I was romanticizing the situation because the kid was probably distracting himself or daydreaming or something, but I thought maybe he was like Hamlet looking at his hands, thinking sincerely about what it means to have been born. — Donald Miller

And I think for a moment, because people don't actually ask that very often. They tell me what they think I feel because they've read it in books, or they say incredible things like "autistic people have no sense of humour or imagination or empathy" when I'm standing right there beside them (and one day I'm going to point out that that is more than a little bit rude, not to mention Not Even True) or they -- even worse -- talk to me like I'm about five, and can't understand.
"It's like living with all your senses turned up to full volume all the time," I say. "And it's like living life in a different language, so you can't ever quite relax because even when you think you're fluent it's still using a different part of your brain so by the end of the day you're exhausted. — Rachael Lucas

I saw the Eagle Tree for the first time on the third Monday of the month of March, which I guess could be considered auspicious if I believed in magic or superstition or religion ... — Ned Hayes

When I was a child and told my mother I didn't felt this was my planet, she thought I was schizophrenic or autistic. When later I finished a college degree and started working in different countries, she called me monster and started threatening me. Nearly 40 years later, when I was making a living from the books I wrote based on what I know, and making 6 times more money than she ever will, she apologized. I'm just not sure why or what she was apologizing for. I had already forgiven her ignorance when realizing nobody would ever believe the truth but myself. I had to go the whole way alone. Nobody was going to come with me on this very long, painful and challenging journey that humans call life but for me was much more than that, it was my mission, of changing their whole future far beyond the time when I'm gone. She was never my mother but merely the human body that gave me birth. In that sense, I am a monster, because I had no love. I had to find that too, on my own. — Robin Sacredfire

Being autistic doesn't make me any less human. It just makes me who I am. Just like you are. — Tina J. Richardson

In real life I always seem to have a hard time winding up a conversation or asking somebody to leave, and sometimes the moment becomes so delicate and fraught with social complexity that I'll get overwhelmed trying to sort out all the different possible ways of saying it and all the different implications of each option and will just sort of blank out and do it totally straight
'I want to terminate the conversation and not have you be in my apartment anymore'
which evidently makes me look either as if I'm very rude and abrupt or as if I'm semi-autistic and have no sense of how to wind up a conversation gracefully ... I've actually lost friends this way. — David Foster Wallace

I am a whole person. I'm not a neurotypical person with an 'autism' part. I'm not a disabled neurotypical. I am a whole autisic person!. — Tina J. Richardson

The word "autism" still conveys a fixed and dreadful meaning to most people - they visualize a child mute, rocking, screaming, inaccessible, cut off from human contact. And we almost always speak of autistic children, never of autistic adults, as if such children never grew up, or were somehow mysteriously spirited off the planet, out of society. — Temple Grandin

You willingly tie yourself to these leashes. And you willingly become utterly socially autistic. You no longer pick up on basic human communication clues. You're at a table with three humans, all of whom are looking at you and trying to talk to you, and you're staring at a screen, — Dave Eggers

This tree was a vast cylinder of wood. It filled the sky. The limbs reached out above me, a great canopy sheltering the rest of the trees, as if they were its children. — Ned Hayes

No relationship is without its difficulties and this is certainly true when one or both of the persons involved has an autistic spectrum disorder. Even so, I believe what is truly essential to the success of any relationship is not so much compatibility, but love. When you love someone, virtually anything is possible. — Daniel Tammet

I am normal. I belong. I have a friend who can kick ass from a wheelchair. I live independently and get good grades. I'm an excellent lover.
Like I said. I'm awesome. I'm Emmet David Washington. Train Man. The best autistic Blues Brother on the block. — Heidi Cullinan

Many autistic children like to smell things, and smell may provide more reliable information about their surroundings than either vision or hearing. — Temple Grandin

I sometimes think I might be autistic because I like to know - I need to know - my beginnings and my ends. I don't have to be in control of it, but I need to know what's going on. — Clay Aiken

I understand perfectly why some of my autistic patients scream and flap their arms
it's to frighten off extroverts — Mark Vonnegut

I don't particularly like explaining being autistic to bewildered people. I might as well say I'm an alien as they probably would understand and accept that more. — Tina J. Richardson

Animals are like autistic savants. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that animals might actually be autistic savants. Animals have special talents normal people don't, the same way autistic people have special talents normal people don't; and at least some animals have special forms of genius normal people don't, the same way some autistic savants have special forms of genius. I think most of the time animal genius probably happens for the same reason autistic genius does: a difference in the brain autistic people share with animals. — Temple Grandin

But how?" my students ask. "How do you actually do it?"
You sit down, I say. You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day. This is how you train your unconscious to kick in for you creatively. So you sit down at, say, nine every morning, or ten every night. You put a piece of paper in the typewriter, or you turn on the computer and bring up the right file, and then you stare at it for an hour or so. You begin rocking, just a little at first, and then like a huge autistic child. You look at the ceiling, and over at the clock, yawn, and stare at the paper again. Then, with your fingers poised on the keyboard, you squint at an image that is forming in your mind
a scene, a locale, a character, whatever
and you try to quiet your mind so you can hear what that landscape or character has to say above the other voices in your mind. — Anne Lamott

A speech-language pathologist named Michelle Garcia Winner told me that many parents in her practice became aware of their own autistic traits only in the wake of their child's diagnosis. — Steve Silberman

in that cold autistic dark. — Cormac McCarthy

Many autistic people have this ability to learn weird foreign languages, and I think I've heard of autistic Americans who have been obsessed [with] Icelandic and learned it and speak it fluently, and I've seen it done in interviews on television. — Jon Gnarr

I fall for centuries of life. First sunlight touches this hillside; and buried inside the earth, a seed stirs, turning slowly in the deep soil like a tadpole turning itself in a dank pool. — Ned Hayes

I don't HAVE Autism, I am Autistic. It doesn't mean I see myself as a 'disability' first and a person second. I'm me, you cannot separate 'the Autism' out of me. I'm wired this way. I was born this way. I am this way — Tina J. Richardson

Lord, let me write,
leave me autistic and typing
until my windows bust into a thousand silver doves
and I know the poem is done. — Buddy Wakefield

People will make a life in their own terms, whether they are deaf or colorblind or autistic or whatever. And their world will be quite as rich and interesting and full as our world. — Oliver Sacks

I myself am opaque, for some reason. Their eyes cannot see me. Yes, that's it: The world is autistic with respect to me. — Anne Nesbet

My little brother is autistic, so I would love to be involved in a charity for autism, but I haven't found the right one yet. — Nikki Reed

By autistic standards, the "normal" brain is easily distractible, is obsessively social, and suffers from a deficit of attention to detail and routine. Thus people on the spectrum experience the neurotypical world as relentlessly unpredictable and chaotic, perpetually turned up too loud, and full of people who have little respect for personal space. — Steve Silberman

My arms sometimes move on their own in big flapping motions, as if I might take off, and my hands spin like a hummingbird's wings. — Ned Hayes

Being autistic is not everything about me. Try not to define me by my diagnosis. — Tina J. Richardson

I am fine as an autistic person, value me as I am. Don't look at me as a broken neurotypical. — Tina J. Richardson

People on the autistic spectrum tend to get fixated on what they think. — Temple Grandin

I felt the bark of the trees on either side of me as I walked. It was very soothing. Here in the LBA Woods, the trees grew very close together and when I did not walk on the path, I would reach out with my fingertips and touch their bark as I passed. The skin of the trees was warm in the sunlight, and rough, and I imagined that each tree contained a soul. Like an Ent. I knew this idea was not a true thing, but still I felt good that the trees were here. — Ned Hayes

If you just did what you wanted to do, and didn't care what anyone thought, you'd be Autistic. — Seamus McDuff

Autistic people view the world in a different light, in ways many could never imagine. — Tina J. Richardson

Autistic children often show no real fears of danger despite obvious risks of harm. This may be easy to spot in a young child who bolts for the street at a moment's notice, or plunges into water with no fear of its depth without being able to swim. But what does it look like in an older child, one on the cusp of adolescence? — Jeannie Davide-Rivera