Top 140 Graeme Simsion Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Unlike the stereotypical wedding dress, it was – to use a technical term – elegant, like a computer algorithm that achieved an impressive outcome with just a few lines of code.”

— Graeme Simsion

102. “You think I can’t catch a ball?’ said Hudson.”

— Graeme Simsion

103. “Rosie and I were on our way to New York, where being weird is acceptable.”

— Graeme Simsion

104. “It is generally less time-consuming to do work myself than to get involved in the paperwork required to get help.”

— Graeme Simsion

105. “All of us are programmed-genetically programmed-to keep doing what’s worked for us, and to avoid things that didn’t work.”

— Graeme Simsion

106. “The problem is not my suitability as a partner, it’s my suitability as a father.”

— Graeme Simsion

107. “Lack of coolness can be pretty cool.”

— Graeme Simsion

108. “Feel! Feel, feel, feel! Feelings were disrupting my sense of well-being.”

— Graeme Simsion

109. “I pulled off the jacket, the item that had made me temporarily acceptable in a world to which I did not belong, and threw it in a rubbish bin. The tie followed.”

— Graeme Simsion

110. “Restaurants are minefields for the socially inept, and I was nervous as always in these situations. But we got off to an excellent start when we both arrived at exactly 7:00 PM as arranged. Poor synchronization is a huge waste of time.”

— Graeme Simsion

111. “I had begun to realise how much I’d adapted to Keith’s needs and preferences. Just small stuff: what time we went to bed, which side I slept on, not cooking cauliflower. Allowances and adaptions anyone in a long-term relationship has to make, accumulating over time. But I wasn’t in a relationship anymore. I wanted to know what of myself needed to be reclaimed.”

— Graeme Simsion

112. “If you really love someone,” Claudia continued, “you have to be prepared to accept them as they are. Maybe you hope that one day they get a wake-up call and make the changes for their own reasons.”

— Graeme Simsion

113. “Humans should be permanently under development.”

— Graeme Simsion

114. “The bar was noisy and there was more baseball playing on a large television screen. Some other men, who did not appear to have previously met Fat Baseball Fan, joined our discussion. We drank a lot of beer, and talked about baseball statistics. Rosie sat on a stool with her drink and observed. It was late when Fat Baseball Fan, whose actual name was Dave, said he had to go home. We exchanged email addresses and I considered that I had made a new friend.”

— Graeme Simsion

115. “Hate causes distress, potentially leading to mental and physical health problems. Adolescents.”

— Graeme Simsion

116. “Since when do women discuss anything explicitly?”

— Graeme Simsion

117. “She looked at me. ‘Do you know how to relax? How to just have fun?’ It was too complex a question to answer over the wind noise as we pulled away from the lights. And the pursuit of fun does not lead to overall contentment. Studies have shown this consistently.”

— Graeme Simsion

118. “Life is full of should-be’s.”

— Graeme Simsion

119. “I don’t want him regarding women as some other species.” I pointed out that I had attended a co-educational public school and had ended up regarding the majority of the human race as another species.”

— Graeme Simsion

120. “Whatever behavior modifications you require from me are a trivial price to pay for have you as my partner.”

— Graeme Simsion

121. “I set out to write a screenplay but, since my early 20s, had dreamed of writing a novel.”

— Graeme Simsion

122. “For many years I had ignored sports, but Dave had encouraged an interest in baseball and I had slowly acquired the ability to engage emotionally with the outcome of a contest that had no direct bearing on my life.”

— Graeme Simsion

123. “It is traditional to encourage questions, but they typically reflect the concerns of one student and are of minimal relevance to the rest of the class.”

— Graeme Simsion

124. “I had never thought of him as actually weird – possibly because we might both be weird along the same dimensions.”

— Graeme Simsion

125. “The great thing about homo sapiens is that we’ve got a brain that can override our instincts. If we want it to.”

— Graeme Simsion

126. “Resilience, in my experience, was seldom the reason to do anything. It was only ever stated as a goal after some action that required it had occurred or been committed to.”

— Graeme Simsion

127. “What if you’re wrong and there is no problem? I may create a problem by responding to an imaginary one. Like falling over because you think there’s a step and there isn’t one.”

— Graeme Simsion

128. “Any break from the pressure to fit in was to be exploited without hesitation.”

— Graeme Simsion

129. “In my experience, most of the pleasure accrues to the giver. The victim is frequently under pressure to feign, at short notice, a positive response to an unwanted object or unscheduled event.”

— Graeme Simsion

130. “I consider tribalism one of the worst aspects of human behaviour. A major contributor to confirmation bias, lack of innovation in public policy, war...”

— Graeme Simsion

131. “Rosie, who had encouraged me to look beyond my limitations, who was the reason for my life being more than I had ever envisioned.”

— Graeme Simsion

132. “You know what my doctor said about that book you’ve been reading? “Give it to someone you hate.”

— Graeme Simsion

133. “Humans instinctively trust personal experience over research.”

— Graeme Simsion

134. “It seems to me that you’ve been giving a lot of encouragement to his friend, but you’ve been critical of him. Maybe that’s because you’re more concerned about his development than hers, but all he’s going to hear at his age is the criticism. And he’ll translate that as you loving him less than her.”

— Graeme Simsion

135. “The trouble”, said Gene, “is that the things that Rosie loves you for are exactly the things that make her think you’re too... different, to be a father. She may be a risk taker with relationships, but no woman’s a risk taker with her kids. In the end, it will come down to persuading her you’re... average enough to be a father.”

— Graeme Simsion

136. “Any alteration to an optimal situation can only be negative.”

— Graeme Simsion

137. “As we age, we sleep less soundly: one evolutionary explanation is that in the ancestral environment the young hunters and warriors required undisturbed sleep, while the older members of the tribe acted as watchdogs and needed to be woken by the slightest noise.”

— Graeme Simsion

138. “Approaching systemic problems via individual cases is inefficient and involves people – hence uncontrollable effects at the level of intervention. High-level action is vastly more effective. Like modifying the mosquito genome rather than treating individual cases of malaria.”

— Graeme Simsion

139. “What are your professional qualifications?’ He laughed. ‘The university of life. The school of hard knocks.”

— Graeme Simsion

140. “Instincts that worked in the ancestral environment were not sufficient in a world that regulated playground visits and allowed choices between tofu and pizza.”

— Graeme Simsion

141. “Tough thing, to forgive someone when they’re in the wrong.’ She laughed. ‘That’s what forgiveness is.”

— Graeme Simsion

142. “Do not mess with this man’s threads!”

— Graeme Simsion

143. “We’ll have to decide if that’s a mandatory requirement or negotiable. If it’s negotiable then we have more scope for innovative solutions.”

— Graeme Simsion

144. “People don’t always mention their motivations. They don’t always know them. That’s why I have a job.”

— Graeme Simsion

145. “I have a theory that everyone is as odd as I am when they are alone.”

— Graeme Simsion

146. “I was a scientist. I was autistic. These were my key strengths.”

— Graeme Simsion

147. “Most people found dissection unpleasant, yet it was important to be able to perform unpleasant tasks. Changing diapers, cleaning up vomit, and hugging relatives were life skills.”

— Graeme Simsion

148. “This was becoming ridiculous. Vast numbers of questions were unanswered, vast amounts of information needed to be exchanged, and now Claudia was introducing further topics. It was fortunate that I was among friends and family, or I would have had some sort of brain-overload-related breakdown. We needed to prioritize the issues to deal with them one by one.”

— Graeme Simsion

149. “Boy or girl?’ said Rosie. ‘Male, I think.’ I checked my message. ‘No, female.’ It was a detail that could have waited. It would be years before the difference was important.”

— Graeme Simsion