Nathan Filer Quotes

Except you're not on my side, are you Steve? Because if you were on my side you just would have handed me the dictionary like a grown-up. Because if you make a big fucking gesture of it Steve, then it becomes a big fucking deal.

I need to slow down because I want to explain how my world slowed down. I also need to talk about how life has a shape and a size, and how it can be made to fit into something small – like a house.

I don't want the world to keep turning without me on it.

We are selfish, my illness and I. We think only of ourselves. We shape the world around us into messages, into secret whispers spoken only for us.

Hello, my name is your potential. But you can call me impossible. I am the missed opportunities. I am the expectations you will never fulfil. I am always taunting you, regardless of how hard you try, regardless of how much you hope. Please put talcum powder on my arse when you wash me, and take note of how our shit smells exactly the same.

I guess there's a Use By date when it comes to blaming your parents for how messed up you are.

It doesn't need to be perfect,' she said at last. 'It's already wonderful.

Her brother has a disease, an illness with the shape and sound of a snake. It slithers through the branches of our family tree. It must have broken her heart, to know that I was next.

This is what labels do. They stick. If people think you're MAD, then everything you do, everything you think, will have MAD stamped across it.

When she turned to see me smiling. It was an awkward smile, but you only really know what a smile means when you own the face behind it. Everyone else just sees the smile they expected it to be.

I nestled into the nook of Mum's arm. Then lay on a cushion on her lap. I fell asleep like that. She's all bones and hard edges. She's never been comfortable, but she's always been there.

What I did at the memorial, was listen.
To the laughter and the tears, and to the quiet stillness that followed.

The worst thing about this illness isn't the things it makes me believe, or what it makes me do. It's not the control that it has over me, or even the control it's allowed other people to take.
Worse than all of that is how I have become selfish.

Day and night flash in a strobe, seasons collide, clouds explode, candles melt onto icing sugar, a wreath rots way. The boy and his dad rush through time, thumbs pressed together.
The boy grows like a weed.
And in every moment is a world unseen - beyond balconies, outside of memory, far from the reach of understanding

Hink back through your own life, to when you were eight or nine years old. See if the memories you have are the ones you might expect. or if they are fragments, dislocated moments, a smell here, a feeling there. The unlikeliest conversations and places. We don't choose what we keep - not at that age. Not ever, really.

Try and remember that if you can. Hold onto it through everything else that happens in life, through all the things that might make you want to forget - keep it safe somewhere.

Any punishment is an insult to the crime

This is how we piece together our past. We do it like a jigsaw puzzle, where there are missing pieces. But so long as we have enough of the pieces, we can know what belongs in the gaps.

That was sort of our family portrait. It's not the kind of thing you think you would miss. Maybe you don't even notice it at all those thousands of times, sitting between your mum and dad on the big green couch with your brother on the carpet getting in the way of the telly. Maybe you don't even notice that.
But you notice it when he isn't there anymore. You notice so many places where he isn't, and you hear so many of the things he doesn't say.
I do.
I hear them all the time.

He repeated the story he liked to tell us. The one with the small boy who was trying to lift a rock in his garden, and the boy's dad was watching him heave and sweat and struggle, but get nowhere. Eventually the dad asks, 'Why don't you use all of your strength?' And the boy says, 'I am, Daddy. I am using all of my strength.' And his dad says, 'No you're not. You haven't asked me for help.

You only really know what a smile means when you own the face behind it. Everyone else just sees the smile they expect it to be.

I think people who are generous with food have a goodness about them.

Most of life isn't anything. Most of life is just the passing of time, and we're even asleep for a fair chunk of that.

It's hard to know what to say sometimes, when someone does something so nice. It's hard to know where to look.

Thinking about the past is like digging up graves

If I look closely I can see we have the same colour eyes, not me and Simon, but me and the boy who is also me, the boy who I can no longer recognise, with whom I no longer share a single thought, worry, or hope.

In the 1970s, a group of researchers got themselves deliberately confined to mental asylums across United States. They did this by pretending to hear voices. They pretended to hear a voice saying, Empty, Dull and Thud.
But as soon as they were admitted to the wards, they stopped pretending and never mention the voice again.
And here's the mad part
The hospital staff outright refused to believe they were better, and kept them locked up anyway - some of them for months on end -each forced into accepting they had a mental illness, and agreeing to take drugs as a condition of their release. This is what labels do. They stick.

If we meet each other in the street, glance away and look back, we might look the same, feel the same, think the same, but the subatomic particles, the smallest parts of us that make every other part, will have rushed away, been replaced at impossible speed. We will be completely different people. Everything changes all the time.

But that is what these people do - the Steves of this world - they all try and make something out of nothing. and they all do it for themselves.

It's like we each have a wall that separates our dreams from reality, but mine has cracks in it. The dreams can wriggle and squeeze their way through, until it's hard to know the difference.

I think there are as many versions of a story as there are people who read it.

I should write about why he left.
But there are different versions of truth. If we meet each other in the street, glance away and look back, we might look the same, feel the same, think the same, but the subatomic particles, the smallest parts of us that make every other part, will have rushed away, been replaced at impossible speeds. We will be completely different people. Everything changes all the time.
Truth changes.
Here are three truths.

I can only describe reality as I know it. I'm doing my best, and promise to keep trying. Shake on it.

There is weather and there is climate.
If it rains outside, or if you stab a classmate's shoulder with a compass needle, over and over, until his white cotton school shirt looks like blotting paper; that is weather.
But if you live in a place where is is often likely to rain, or your perception falters and dislocates so that you retreat, suspicious and afraid of those closest to you, that is climate.

Billions of years ago exploding stars sent atoms hurtling through space and we've been recycling them on Earth ever since. Except for the occasional comet, meteor, some interstellar dust, we've used exactly the same atoms over and over since the earth was formed. We eat them, we drink them, we breathe them, we are made of them. At this precise moment each of us is exchanging our atoms with everyone else, and not just with each other, but with other animals, trees, fungi, moulds...

These are the moments that make the dot-to-dot pictures of our past; everything else is simply filling in the gaps.

Some memories refuse to be locked in time or place, they are always present.

She's known sadness. That's what it is. I only just thought that as I wrote it. She's known sadness, and it has made her kind.

Release. This is what labels do. They stick. If people think you're MAD, then everything you do, everything you think, will have MAD stamped across it. One of the

I guess children believe whatever they want to believe. Perhaps adults do too.

But one thing I've learnt about people, is that they can always surprise you.

That's a fear when someone you love dies, isn't it? Especially if you're only young when it happens, you might worry that over time you'll stop being able to picture them properly. Or that the sound of their voice will merge into other voices, so that you can no longer be sure how it was they sounded.

Practice what you preach