Autistic People Quotes & Sayings

I sometimes think that I might be slightly autistic. There might be a syndrome that hasn't been named. I don't seem to see the world in the same way that most people I know see it. They don't seem to be baffled by it. — John Banville

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

Normal people have an incredible lack of empathy. They have good emotional empathy, but they don't have much empathy for the autistic kid who is screaming at the baseball game because he can't stand the sensory overload. Or the autistic kid having a meltdown in the school cafeteria because there's too much stimulation. — Temple Grandin

As an autistic, I have thoughts and ideas of my own. Not all people on the spectrum think the same. — Tina J. Richardson

Ten minutes after loading up her plate, when Iris is sipping pale apple juice, she asks Els across the table, "I'm told I should make myself useful. What are my options?"
Els spears a strawberry. "What can you do?"
"I organize."
"Like your sister."
"I organize people, events," Iris says. "Denise organizes information."
I absorb that. I never thought of myself as organizing anything. I think of myself as listening, coping, avoiding. The words feel good, rolled over in my mind: Denise organizes information. — Corinne Duyvis

I don't know of any neuropsychiatric disorder other than an infection that has been cured. But the goal is to improve the quality of life of people who experience autistic symptomology and I just think we will make progress on that. — Gerald Fischbach

I connect fashion to other peoples' elegance, but not my own. I don't think I've ever felt elegant. I've felt appropriate, but never elegant, and I wonder what that must be like. I like it when other people are elegant - I prefer it - but I can't do it myself. I honestly think it's some form of autistic disorder. — Douglas Coupland

It's time to cure society, not autistic people. — Tina J. Richardson

The World can feel like a strange and confusing place for an autistic person. Lights, sounds and smells are extremely intense and overwhelming sometimes. People also can be confusing and overwhelming to me. It can help me if you are consistent with what you say and do; please say what you mean. Also provide me with a safe, quiet place to recover when I'm really overwhelmed. Please speak quietly and calmly and give me time to de-stress. — 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

Many autistic people fight against the environment every day, and no one sees, no one knows, because on the outside they appear calm. They have learned how to endure the assaults on their senses that occur daily - something we can't even imagine - and most, like my son, do it with dignity and quiet grace. — Liz Becker

In America we've spent over a billion dollars on autism research. What have we got for that? We've not seen anything that's appreciably impacted the quality of life of autistic people, regardless of their place on the spectrum. Quite frankly, we've spent $1bn figuring out how to make mice autistic and we'll spend another $1bn figuring out how to make them not autistic. And that's not what the average person wakes up in the morning aspiring to. They think: am I going to be able to find a job, to communicate, to live independently, either on my own or with support? Those are the real priorities. — Ari Ne'eman

Researchers would eventually discover that autistic people stim to reduce anxiety - and also simply because it feels good. In fact, harmless forms of self-stimulation (like flapping and fidgeting) may facilitate learning by freeing up executive-functioning resources in the brain that would otherwise be devoted to suppressing them. — Steve Silberman

I think that autistic brains tend to be specialized brains. Autistic people tend to be less social. It takes a ton of processor space in the brain to have all the social circuits. — Temple Grandin

I go to all the appointments. All the meetings. I sit with the team of inclusion teachers, occupational therapists, doctors, social workers, remedial teachers, and the cab driver that gets him from appointment to appointment, and I push for everything that can be done for my autistic boy. But I will never have a plan that will fix him. Noah is not something to be fixed.
And our life will never be normal. And people always say,
oh well what's normal, there's no such thing really, and I say
sure there is ... there's a spectrum ... and there's lots and lots of possibilities within that spectrum, and trust me buddy, ducks on the moon ain't one of them ... .but ... .
In this abnormal life, I get to live with a pirate,
and a bird fancier, and an ogre, and a hedgehog, and many many superheroes, and aliens and monsters
and an angel.
I get to go to infinity and beyond. — Kelley Jo Burke

You'd be surprised
just how many people
are autistic. Stop the stereotypes. — Tina J. Richardson

Normal people think we're highly dependent and can't live without ongoing support, but in fact there are times when we're stoic heroes. — Naoki Higashida

They often took a difficulty I had and turned it into an amusing little anecdote. They would take a deadly seriousness, my seriousness, and turn it into a great laugh that they would then let out into the room. What kind of people were they to do that? The amusing anecdote had sharp edges, flew into me and scratched my soul. — Gunilla Gerland

Every engineer, doctor, and farmer on this ship has relatives on the waiting list, too, and those relatives won't be drug addicts.
Mom's right: no one would pick her from a waiting list.
No one would've picked me, either.
Usefulness or death can't be her only options. If being picked from the waiting list isn't feasible, then the one choice left is to smuggle her in. The back of my mind keeps whispering about the risk, about She'd only be a drain, but I shut it up. There's a difference between leaving Mom and leaving Mom to die.
"I'm glad you agree," Iris says. "I know it's not easy."
That's what I hate. She's right. It's not. I still don't want to break the rules, even if it's to help Mom. But people on TV never abandon their family; they risk their own lives. That's what you're supposed to do.
On TV, people just never feel this twisted about it.
"Four this afternoon," I say. "Let's talk. — Corinne Duyvis

I wish people would see us as people first, I really dislike it when people just see 'Autism' with me and thats all i hear all the time. I'm autistic, yes. But think of me as a person always, a human like you. — Tina J. Richardson

Autistic people are individuals. We are not all maths geniuses, we don't all like trains. I am hopeless with technology and much prefer painting. There is no 'typical Autistic.' But I think we probably all like being respected and validated — Jeanette Purkis

Do not fear people with Autism, embrace them, Do not spite people with Autism unite them, Do not deny people with Autism accept them for then their abilities will shine — Paul Isaacs

Certainly not everybody that is different is necessarily autistic, but there are a lot of undiagnosed people, and it's not necessarily something that needs to have attention to it, unless that person is feeling uncomfortable in the world or they need extra help or something. — Jasika Nicole

Christians need to take the lead in educating people that children are gifts, as my autistic grandson most surely is. By going down the path we're currently on, we might one day get rid of genetic diseases, but only at the cost of our own humanity. — Charles Colson

The word "autistic" is accurate. But so are other words that we no longer use to describe people: spinster (unmarried woman), hobo (migrant worker), cripple (person with a physical handicap), and so on. The fact that a person is unmarried or has sustained a mobility-reducing injury or birth defect certainly figures into their life experiences, but it does not define their character - unless they or we let it. — Ellen Notbohm

I loosen my grip and take a tasteless bite. I don't like bananas much - they're so mealy - but they're a safe fruit to eat, always cleanly wrapped in their own packages. As I chew, I crane my neck to check out the people around us. — Corinne Duyvis

But I ask you, those of you who are with us all day, not to stress yourselves out because of us. When you do this, it feels as if you're denying any value at all that our lives may have
and that saps the spirit we need to soldier on. The hardest ordeal for us is the idea that we are causing grief for other people. We can put up with our own hardships okay, but the thought that our lives are the source of other people's unhappiness, that's plain unbearable. — Naoki Higashida

We are convinced, then, that autistic people have their place in the organism of the social community. They fulfil their role well, perhaps better than anyone else could, and we are talking of people who as children had the greatest difficulties and caused untold worries to their care-givers. — Hans Asperger

My girlfriend's family think I'm shy. Or slightly autistic (she told me one night). I'm not. I just don't like some people. These are some of those people. — Sean Mackaay

Wade drops down off his bed - a bed handmade by a local boy down the road, a real autistic type who doesn't do well with people but can make a set of fresh-cut logs sing beneath saw and sandpaper. He groans and winces. He's old now, and feels the movements of the morning especially keenly; often he feels like a beater car that takes a while to start up. But this, this has him starting up - regardless of the arthritis squeezing his knees and the popcorn crackle of his back. — Chuck Wendig

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

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

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

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 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

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

Many people think trees grow so big from soil and water, but this is not true. Trees get their mass from the air. They gobble up airborne carbon dioxide and perform an act of chemical fission by using the energy from sunshine ... Essentially, trees are made of air and sunshine. — Ned Hayes

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

People ask what the hardest thing is about having an autistic child, and for me the answer is easy. What mom doesn't want to hear her baby tell her that he loves her or to feel his arms around her? — Kristine Barnett

Steve Jobs was probably mildly on the autistic spectrum. Basically, you've probably known people who were geeky and socially awkward but very smart. When does geeks and nerds become autism? That's a gray area. Half the people in Silicon Valley probably have autism. — Temple Grandin

Most people assume that autistic people are not capable of empathy. — Claire Danes

Why do non autistic people have interests/hobbies. But, autistic people have obsessions? — Tina J. Richardson

Some autistic people may emerge from their condition, but nobody knows when and why. — Andrew Solomon

I mean: if you're going outside to look for your sister, I get it." Max goes silent. Maybe Mirjam's death is hitting him now, maybe his voice will choke - but he goes on. "But if you're going outside to help your mother . . ." He gestures helplessly at my injured arm. His fingers stop a centimeter away, hovering in midair. "Don't risk it. Don't risk you."
"She's my mother."
"The captain will never let her on if she doesn't even try. Not when there are so many people who haven't had thechance to try. People we can use on the ship. People who have been on that waiting list forever."
There are a dozen things I want to say. But she's mymother - as though that means as much as people pretend it does.
She is trying, just in a different way - as though I'm convincing myself.
I wasn't on that waiting list, either.
I might not be someone the ship can use, as much as I'm trying to be. — Corinne Duyvis

Some people may say he's autistic," I said. "Others may say he's an angel," Liv said. I nodded. "That too." — Natasha Boyd

(On talking about her three autistic sons).. I'm a better person because of them. They have showed me what it's like to struggle in life. They have showed me what is important in life. They are the strongest people I know. They have endured so much in their short lifespans already that most people haven't done in their entire lives. — Anonymous

I don't want to be a genius or a freak or something on display. I wish for empathy and compassion from those around me, and I appreciate sincerity, clarity, and logicality in other people. I believe most people - autistic or not - share this wish. And now, with my newfound insight, I'm on the way to achieving that goal. I hope you'll keep those thoughts in mind the next time you meet someone who looks or acts a little strange. — John Elder Robison

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

Research demonstrates that autistic traits are distributed into the non-autistic population; some people have more of them, some have fewer. History suggests that many individuals whom we would today diagnose as autistic - some severely so - contributed profoundly to our art, our math, our science, and our literature. — Morton Ann Gernsbacher

Striking up conversations with strangers is something like extreme sports for autistic people. — Kamran Nazeer