Nine Minds

30. Excerpts from Kana's scale of loneliness:
- 0 - Contentment - Being wholly at ease with the world.
- 3 - Mild Isolation - Aloneness is noticed regularly, living and work spaces seem excessively large.
- 4 - Moderate Isolation - Aloneness is unpleasant like body odor, days feel very long.
- 6 - Estrangement - Sense of not belonging, being unlike others, connection is difficult.
- 8 - Severe Exclusion - Sensation of being cut off from others by an invisible wall.
- 10 - Foresakenness - Empties life of meaning, all possibility of connection seems lost.
63. "Sometimes (neurotypical people) they'll tell themselves a story..." Colleagues would fall in with each other's certainty... Some can get pretty wound up if you can't see how everything points to so and so... So Warren would take a look, but something would niggle at him. A problem of logic.
72. Things are never only as they appear. Because something is doesn't mean it always was.
73. Our lives are lived forwards but understood backwards.
113. Like Billy, Elly had grown more or less silent by the age of two, devoting herself to her senses to the exclusion of people, playing by herself in ways that quickly became repetitive.
117. Billy's way of thinking and feeling and perceiving bypasses words. This inarticulacy has nothing to do with any lack of intelligence or curiosity or the desire to reach out to others. It has to do with an inner world that is pictorial, musical, and the many meanings he is able to find in shape, color, motion, tone, and rhythm.
143. For sighted people, a room is filled with light. Every item, feature, piece of furniture is a different reflection of this light. A white door looks different to a long desk or a thick wall because each reflects the light in its own way. Now, for Amanda, who is blind, a room is filled not with light but sound. Sound, bouncing constantly back and forth, much as sighted people's light, is a reflection of everything that surrounds her.
147. Aspects of autistic thought are especially conducive to creativity, she'd said, notably literary creation. Inventing and playing with words; speaking - or writing - at length on a favored topic; reveling in rhyme and the repetition of sounds; listing, arranging, classifying.
148. Wanting to reach out, but doubting it'll be worth the effort, since his effort would need to be so much greater than most other people's.
148. It's always been my experience that what we do with our minds, we do with our whole bodies.
157. All those words that opened rooms within rooms within rooms inside you. Words that took your mind in at least five different directions at once.
243. Dan Ackroyd's psychologist talked of childhood schizophrenia (as the autistic spectrum was still called then in some parts)... An excess of imagination, it was thought, leading the child inwards. Only later would autism become associated with blankness, or incapacity. No longer associated with imagination, let alone artistry.
246. When Danny came out of the theater, he felt more alert to the life that pulsed all around him... There they were, the very same theater games that he played, in the prim gossips who matched their faces to their listener's reaction, in the gestures of candor, or encouragement, or exaggeration that animated hands, in the gaits that stiffened as a cop or a clergyman passed.