Top 45 Nathan Filer Quotes
#1. 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.
Nathan Filer
#3. Thinking about the past is like digging up graves
Nathan Filer
#4. I don't want the world to keep turning without me on it.
Nathan Filer
#5. 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.
Nathan Filer
#6. I think people who are generous with food have a goodness about them.
Nathan Filer
#7. These are the moments that make the dot-to-dot pictures of our past; everything else is simply filling in the gaps.
Nathan Filer
#8. Words like guilt and shame and nightmares - the kind of nightmares that drag you from sleep, and leave you reaching for something no longer there.
Nathan Filer
#9. Some people can remember way back to the beginning of their lives. I've even met people who say they can remember being born.
Nathan Filer
#10. It doesn't need to be perfect,' she said at last. 'It's already wonderful.
Nathan Filer
#11. 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.
Nathan Filer
#12. She would never force her company on someone, no matter how much she might want to.
Ha.
She's like a vampire. She has to be invited in.
Nathan Filer
#13. Some madness doesn't act mad to begin with, sometimes it will knock politely at the door, and when you let it in, it'll simply sit in the corner without a fuss - and grow.
Nathan Filer
#14. I can only describe reality as I know it. I'm doing my best, and promise to keep trying. Shake on it.
Nathan Filer
#16. 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
Nathan Filer
#17. 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.
Nathan Filer
#18. 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.
Nathan Filer
#19. Writing about the past is a way of reliving it, a way of seeing it unfold all over again. We place memories on pieces of paper to know they will always exist.
Nathan Filer
#20. A good thing about talking to someone who is standing behind you is that you can pretend you don't know they're crying, and not trouble yourself too much with working out why. You can simply concentrate on helping them feel better.
Nathan Filer
#21. 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.
Nathan Filer
#22. 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.
Nathan Filer
#23. Inside my head is a jigsaw made of trillions and trillions and trillions of atoms. It might take a while.
Nathan Filer
#24. But one thing I've learnt about people, is that they can always surprise you.
Nathan Filer
#25. What I did at the memorial, was listen.
To the laughter and the tears, and to the quiet stillness that followed.
Nathan Filer
#26. 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.
Nathan Filer
#27. 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.
Nathan Filer
#28. 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.
Nathan Filer
#29. 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.
Nathan Filer
#30. I guess children believe whatever they want to believe. Perhaps adults do too.
Nathan Filer
#32. I decided each name on each spine was the person who the book had been written for, rather than who had written it. I decided everyone in the world had a book with their name on, and if I searched hard enough I'd eventually find mine.
Nathan Filer
#33. I guess there's a Use By date when it comes to blaming your parents for how messed up you are.
Nathan Filer
#34. 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.
Nathan Filer
#35. Some memories refuse to be locked in time or place, they are always present.
Nathan Filer
#36. 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.
Nathan Filer
#37. It's hard to know what to say sometimes, when someone does something so nice. It's hard to know where to look.
Nathan Filer
#38. 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.
Nathan Filer
#39. Mental illness turns people inwards. That's what I reckon. It keeps up forever trapped by the pain of our own minds, in the same way that the pain of a broken leg or a cut thumb will grab your attention, holding it so tightly that your good leg or your good thumb seem to cease to exist.
Nathan Filer
#40. But sometimes all the stars in the entire universe conspire to make something good happen.
Nathan Filer
#41. Some things in life are exactly as we imagine.
Nathan Filer
#42. 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.
Nathan Filer
#43. Really, Matt. You're your own worst enemy.
That's a strange thing to say to someone with a serious mental disease. Of course I'm my own worst enemy. That's the whole problem.
Nathan Filer
#44. I do not have a split mind. I am not different people. I am myself, the same self I have always been, the one person I can never escape.
Nathan Filer
#45. Once-upon-a-time we buried the memories we didn't want.
Nathan Filer
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