Nathan Filer

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

“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, how hard you hope.”

“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.”

“I said that my mother is mad. I said that. But you might not see it. I mean, you might not think that anything I've told you proves she is mad. But there are different kinds of madness. 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. Then one day, maybe many months after your decision to take your son out of school and isolate him in a house for reasons that got lost in your grief, one day that madness will stir in the chair, and it will say to him, 'You look pale.”

“But sometimes all the stars in the entire universe conspire to make something good happen.”

“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.”

“Once-upon-a-time we buried the memories we didn't want.”

“I guess there's a Use By date when it comes to blaming your parents for how messed up you are.I guess that's what turning eighteen means.Time to own it.”

“Any punishment is an insult to the crime”

“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.”

“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.”

“We place memories on pieces of paper to know they will always exist.”