Your favourite quotes on autism

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I was curious if you had any favourite quotes on autism that you would like to share here? If you don't have any, you're welcome to make some up. Here's one I made up earlier :


"We are not human beings having a spiritual experience, but spiritual beings having a human experience." I could add to this, "I am a spiritual being having a human experience which autism is an integral part of."

If you've met one autistic person, you've met one autistic person.

“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 (1944)

"Striking up conversations with strangers is an autistic person's version of extreme sports." Kamran Nazeer


“The trouble is, people will say ‘people who suffers from Aspergers’. No, you don’t suffer from Aspergers, you suffer from other people!” Tony Attwood


“Think of it: a disability is usually defined in terms of what is missing. … But autism … is as much about what is abundant as what is missing, an over-expression of the very traits that make our species unique.”
― Paul Collins, Not Even Wrong: Adventures in Autism


“Would I ever have the courage to tell Wills the truth? That he wasn't just imagining the world was a more difficult place for him to understand than for some of his buddies - that it was, in fact, more difficult for him. That he'd been dealt a rotten hand in that regard, but only in that one regard. Because I wouldn't change one freckle, one misunderstood moment, one tiny piece of him for anything in the world. I would change myself. I would change the things other people said or thought out of ignorance or fear. I would change so many things, but I would absolutely never, in a million years, change him.”
― Monica Holloway, Cowboy & Wills: A Love Story


“You have to be the bravest person in the world to go out every day, being yourself when no one likes who you are.”
― Matthew Dicks, Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend


Just because one plane is flying out of formation, doesn’t mean the formation is on course....
R.D.Lang


Some that I’ve seen in signatures or avatars:

I'm not lost in my own world- I know the place like the back of my hand.

I don't obsess. I think. Intensely.

Another one from Paul Collins

"Autists are the ultimate square pegs, and the problem with pounding a square peg into a round hole is not that the hammering is hard work. It's that you're destroying the peg."

Wow, there are some real gems here. Thanks

On autistics learning social skills:

"It is my philosophy that the skills in this book and others do not represent a model of social correctness. They are, however, ideas of how to behave that may help students reach their own goals. . . . The message is, don’t alter the uniqueness that makes you special in so many great ways—just add to what you can do."

— Dr. Jed Baker, Preparing for Life: The Complete Guide for Transitioning to Adulthood for Those with Autism and Asperger's Syndrome

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31st of July, 2013
Diagnosed: Autism Spectrum Disorder, Auditory-Verbal Processing Speed Disorder, and Visual-Motor Processing Speed Disorder.

Weak Emerging Social Communicator (The Social Thinking-­Social Communication Profile by Michelle Garcia Winner, Pamela Crooke and Stephanie Madrigal)

"I am silently correcting your grammar."

A very old quote going back centuries in one for or another. It had nothing to do with autism when it was first said as far as any one knows.

"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."

Some attribute the quote to Friedrich Nietzsche but it actually predates him afaik.

But I think it sums up nicely what it's like for some of us some of the time.

The only one I can think of is a t-shirt someone gave me that says, "Autism isn't for wimps" or something like that.