The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - Mark Haddon

"I like dogs. You always know what a dog is thinking. It has four moods. Happy, sad, cross and concentrating. Also, dogs are faithful and they do net tell lies because they cannot talk."

"I do not like people shouting at me. It makes me scared that they are going to hit me or touch me and I do not know what is going to happen."

"I rolled back onto the lawn and pressed my forehead to the ground again and made the noise that Father call groaning. I make this noise when there is too much information coming into my head from the outside world. "

"Some people think the Milky Way is a long line of stars, but it isn't. Our galaxy is a huge disc of stars millions of light tears across and the solar system is somewhere near the outside edge of the disc."

"Mother used to say that it meant Christopher was a nice name because it was a story about being kind and helpful, but I do not want my name to mean a story about being kind and helpful. I want my name to mean me."

"But Terry is stupid, so quod erat demonstrandum which is Latin for Which is the thing that was going to be proved, which means Thus it is proved."

"And in the Bible it says Thou shalt not kill but there were the Crusades and two World Wars and the Gulf War and there were Christians killing people in all of them."

"sometimes I look up into the sky and I think that there are molecules of Mother up there, or in clouds over Africa or the Antarctic, or coming down as rain in the rainforests in Brazil, or in snow everywhere."

"I do not like strangers because I do not like people I have never met before. They are hard to understand."

"And all I could see would be stars. And stars are the places where the molecules that life is made of were constructed billions of years ago. For example, all the iron in your blood which stop you being anaemic was made in a star."

"Mr Jeavons said that I liked maths because it was safe."

"I like Sherlock Holmes, but I do not like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who was the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories. That is because he wasn't like Sherlock Holmes and he believed in the supernatural. And when he got old he joined the Spiritualist Society which meant that he believed you could communicate with the dead. This was because his son died of influenza during the First World War and he still wanted to talk to him."

"And I know I can do this because I wen to London on my own, and because I solved the mystery of Who Killed Wellington? and I found my mother and I was brave and I wrote a book and that means I can do anything."

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - Mark Haddon