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Book: A Spot of Bother
Quotes of Book: A Spot of Bother

Mark Haddon _ A Spot of Bother
She idly stroked his head in the way one might stroke a dog.
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Mark Haddon _ A Spot of Bother
How often did he feel it now, this gorgeous, furtive seclusion? In the bath sometimes, maybe. Though Jean failed to understand his need for periodic isolation and regularly dragged him back to earth mid-soak by hammering on the locked door in search of bleach or dental floss.
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Mark Haddon _ A Spot of Bother
Everything seemed suspended, in some kind of balance. Obviously someone would come along and fuck it up, because that's what other people did.
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Mark Haddon _ A Spot of Bother
He had always thought of solitary diners as sad. But now that he was the solitary diner, he felt rather superior. On account of the book, mostly. Learning something while everyone else was wasting time. Like working at night.
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Mark Haddon _ A Spot of Bother
It was true. There really was no limit to the ways in which you could say the wrong thing to your children. You offered an olive branch and it was the wrong olive branch at the wrong time.
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Mark Haddon _ A Spot of Bother
You could say all you liked about reason and logic and common sense and imagination, but when the chips were down the one skill you needed was the ability to think about absolutely nothing whatsoever.
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Mark Haddon _ A Spot of Bother
At teenage parties he was always wandering into the garden, sitting on a bench in the dark . . . staring up at the constellations and pondering all those big questions about the existence of God and the nature of evil and the mystery of death, questions which seemed more important than anything else in the would until a few years passed and some real questions had been dumped into your lap, like how to earn a living, and why people fell in and out of love, and how long you could carry on smoking and then give up without getting lung cancer.
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Mark Haddon _ A Spot of Bother
That was what it meant, didn't it. Being good. You didn't have to sink wells in Burkina Faso. You didn't have to give away your coffee table. You just had to see things from other people's point of view. Remember they were human.
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Mark Haddon _ A Spot of Bother
It exasperated her sometimes. The way men could be so sure of themselves. They put words together like sheds or shelves and you could stand on them they were so solid. And those feelings which overwhelmed you in the small hours turned to smoke.
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Mark Haddon _ A Spot of Bother
He'd tried celibacy. The only problem was the lack of sex.
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Mark Haddon _ A Spot of Bother
He really did not care whether he survived or not, so long as it rendered him unconscious and absolved him of responsibility.
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Mark Haddon _ A Spot of Bother
... He had always rather liked emergencies. Other people's at any rate. They put your own problems into perspective. It was like being on a ferry. You didn't have to think about what you had to do or where you had to go for the next few hours. It was all laid out for you.
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