Autistic Quotes

“Presuming that a nonspeaking child has nothing to say is like presuming that an adult without a car has nowhere to go.”
― Ellen Notbohm, Ten Things Every Child with Autism Wishes You Knew

“Autistic traits, taken together, represent everything that allistics devalue in an audience or social exchange.”
― Melanie Yergeau, Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness

“Waiting or pausing takes enormous skill and practice. However it is a skill that for you has become an essential way of being in the world without being so overwhelmed by it. Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, went even further when he famously said, 'Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response likes our growth and our freedom.'

Waiting in the Light enables you to create a space for grace.”
― Christopher Goodchild, Unclouded by Longing

“One of the cruelest tricks our culture plays on autistic people is that it makes us strangers to ourselves. We grow up knowing we're different, but that difference is defined for us in terms of an absence of neurotypicality, not as the presence of another equally valid way of being.”
― Julia Bascom, Loud Hands: Autistic People, Speaking

“Autistic people have probably done so much for hundreds of years without any credit.”
― Elle McNicoll, A Kind of Spark

“Diagnosis (of autism) is such a clinical word to describe a moment in which your humanity is so deeply affirmed, understood, and valued.”
― Christopher Goodchild, Unclouded by Longing

“Our brokenness is our greatest strength.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Mucize Insan: When The World is Family

“People want so desperately to fit in that they forget what makes them stand out. Be loud. Take up space. Our differences are our strengths.”
― Mickey Rowe, Fearlessly Different: An Autistic Actor's Journey to Broadway's Biggest Stage

“By the time I entered education in the late 1980s, schools were about as well adapted for my neurotype as a set of stairs is adapted for the use by a Dalek.”
― Pete Wharmby, Untypical: How the World Isn’t Built for Autistic People and What We Should All Do About it

“Today you tend to the flower of autism in your interior garden with love. You celebrate, rather than hide away in shame, your idiosyncratic ways and behaviours, and whilst there are many different kinds of wild and colourful flowers here, few have not been touched by the fragrance of autism.”
― Christopher Goodchild, Unclouded by Longing

“What she didn’t realise was smug smiles and shitty comments from people like her, was what fueled me to prove them wrong.”
― Rosie Weldon, My Autistic Fight Song: My Battle into Adulthood and the Workplace

“I spent many years being a square peg and trying to bash myself into a round hole.”
― Rosie Weldon, My Autistic Fight Song: My Battle into Adulthood and the Workplace

“A diagnosis is not a prediction. It doesn’t tell you what’s possible. It doesn’t change you, your colleague, your child, or your friend. It just opens up tricks and tools to thrive.”
― Jolene Stockman, Notes for Neuro Navigators: The Allies' Quick-Start Guide to Championing Neurodivergent Brains

“I believe that disclosure represents a particular kind of inventional site within autism land. Because autism, in the cultural imagination, is an ambiguous and often mystery-laden construct, any disclosure around autism invokes questions, invokes guesswork, incites demands for particularity. One cannot claim autism without being pressed for more -- more information, more cross-examination, more refutation, more response, more words flowing from more mouths.

But there is likewise a problem of ethos (or kakoethos, to quote Jenell Johnson) inherent in these disclosures, wherein autistic people are figured as lacking authority to speak on or from within autism. Autistic academic Dinah Murray laments these figurations of autism and ethos, noting, "Disclosure of an autism spectrum diagnosis means disclosure of the fundamentally flawed personhood implied by [autism's] diagnostic criteria. It is likely to precipitate a negative judgment of capacity involving permanent loss of credibility."

In disclosing autism, we are both too autistic and not autistic enough...”
― Melanie Yergeau, Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness

“The autistic form of life does not conform to assumed social normativity and does not easily extend outward into the social, leading to a 'double empathy problem' between people of diverse dispositions, that is, both parties struggle to understand and relate to one another. Such differences in presentation can lead to dyspathic reactions and stigma, often leading to ill-fated attempts at normalisation and a continuing vicious cycle of psycho-emotional disablement.”
― Damian Milton, A Mismatch of Salience

“Rather than lacking a theory of mind, it is argued here that due to differences in the way autistic people process info, they are not socialised into the same shared ethno as neurotypical people, and thus breaches in understanding happen all the time, leaving both in a state of confusion. The difference is that the neurotypical person can repair the breach, by the reassuring belief that ~99 out of 100 people still think and act like they do, and remind themselves that they are the normal ones.”
― Damian Milton, A Mismatch of Salience

“I stood up as determination rushed through me. I would fight like hell for my life.”
― Rosie Weldon, My Autistic Fight Song: My Battle into Adulthood and the Workplace

“It doesn't ever occur to you, as you fashion your mask so carefully, that it will grow into your skin and graft itself, come to seem irremovable.”
― Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs

“I have autism”
― Helen Keller, Amazing Women

“They're less careful, less capable, and yet somehow the truly terrible things never happen to them. People want to help; they attract kindness---they're looked after by guardian angels wherever they go.”
― Kate Morton, Homecoming

“...the default assumption is that it's better to be nonautistic than it is to be autistic, always. And this assumption has done great damage to autistic and nonautistic people alike.”
― Melanie Yergeau, Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness

“What ABA has come to signal for autistics is an in-made rhetorical paradox from which escape is difficult: the laughable presumption that autistics can only communicate their feelings about ABA because they've endured ABA.”
― Melanie Yergeau, Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness

“Clinical rhetorics present serious challenges to disability disclosure. To claim autism is to claim rudeness, silence, tactlessness, nonpersonhood; it is to invite doubting others to lay-diagnose or question one's rhetorical competence. And yet it is precisely these claims and challenges that buttress much of the autistic culture movement's embrace of public disclosure, of uncloseting one's autism.”
― Melanie Yergeau, Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness

“I do not subscribe to functioning labels because functioning labels are inaccurate and dehumanizing, because functioning labels fail to capture the breadth and complexity and highly contextual interrelations of one's neurology and environment, both of which are plastic and malleable and dynamic. Functioning is the corporeal gone capitalistic -- it is an assumption that one's body and being can be quantitatively measured, that one's bodily outputs and bodily actions are neither outputs nor actions unless commodifiable.”
― Melanie Yergeau, Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness

“Autism is dominantly conceived of as a pathological threat to (normative, liberal versions of) individual life and is even framed as actively spoiling/wasting away this life.”
― Anne McGuire, War on Autism: On the Cultural Logic of Normative Violence

“What is of essential importance is the impact that being autistic has on a person at any given time. This can range from horrifically negative right through to sublimely positive -- and sometimes both can be found in the same individual. So, if this dramatic difference can be seen at different times in the same person -- what 'grade' is that person? Clearly, this is where the whole notion of 'autism severity' crumbles.”
― Luke Beardon, Autism and Asperger Syndrome in Adults

“A great book can feed your soul in a world where the overload of misinformation can break you”
― N.g

“Our brokenness is our greatest strength. I've been broken all my life, for my life is one on the spectrum with OCD to make things worse. But have you ever heard me whine about my brokenness - no – never! For no matter how broken you are, till you give in to your brokenness, it can never break you.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Mucize Insan: When The World is Family

“Because if someone had told me when I was younger that it was OK to not be like everybody else, that it was not my job to try to be "normal" and to "fit in," that my way of seeing the world was just as valid and important as everybody else's, then I think I would have found growing up a lot easier.”
― Abigail Balfe, A Different Sort of Normal: The award-winning true story about growing up autistic

“It's meaningless to question whether a trans Autistic person would have "still" been trans had they not been born neurodiverse, because Autism is such a core part of who we are. Without our disability (or our gender identity) we'd be entirely different people. There is no separating these aspects of ourselves from our personhood or personality. They're both core parts.”
― Devon Price, Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity