{"quotes":[{"text":"[Patricia Highsmith] was an extremely unbalanced person, extremely hostile and misanthropic and totally incapable of any kind of relationship, not just intimate ones. I felt sorry for her, because it wasn't her fault. There was something in her early days or whatever that made her incapable. She drove everybody away and people who really wanted to be friends ended up putting the phone down on her.It seemed to me as if she had to ape feelings and behaviour, like Ripley. Of course sometimes having no sense of social behaviour can be charming, but in her case it was alarming. I remember once, when she was trying to have a dinner party with people she barely knew, she deliberately leaned towards the candle on the table and set fire to her hair. People didn't know what to do as it was a very hostile act and the smell of singeing and burning filled the room.","author":"Andrew Wilson","tags":["alarming","ape","asperger-s","aspergers","aspergers-syndrome","autism","behaviour","burning","charm","charming","dinner-party","fault","feelings","fire","hostile","incapable","intimacy","misanthropic","misanthropy","people","relationship","singeing","social-behaviour","unbalanced"],"id":13973,"author_id":"Andrew+Wilson"},{"text":"Traveling in other countries is especially fun because others often attribute your differences to the less-stigmatizing idea that you're like this only because you're a foreigner.","author":"Michael John Carley","tags":["aspergers","life","travel"],"id":18094,"author_id":"Michael+John+Carley"},{"text":"I don't understand why people never say what they mean. It's like the immigrants who come to a country and learn the language but are completely baffled by idioms. (Seriously, how could anyone who isn't a native English speaker 'get the picture,' so to speak, and not assume it has something to do with a photo or a painting?).","author":"Jodi Picoult","tags":["aspergers","language"],"id":59490,"author_id":"Jodi+Picoult"},{"text":"If you don’t know how to deal with emotion, other people’s feelings can hit you like a drug.","author":"Jael McHenry","tags":["aspergers","drug","emotion","emotions","feelings"],"id":88010,"author_id":"Jael+McHenry"},{"text":"Please don't obsess on the number of friends I have or don't have. I'll find my own way, it will be right for me.","author":"Tina J. Richardson","tags":["aspergers","autism","friends"],"id":135120,"author_id":"Tina+J.+Richardson"},{"text":"Being autistic does not mean I don't have empathy. Stereotypes are harmful. If anything I hyper feel everything and have to try to shut off to cope.","author":"Tina J. Richardson","tags":["aspergers","autism","autistic","empathy","feel"],"id":142674,"author_id":"Tina+J.+Richardson"},{"text":"As I've gotten older, I have taught myself to act 'normal.' I can do it well enough to fool the average person for a whole evening, maybe longer. But it all falls apart if I hear something that elicits a strong emotional reaction from me that is different from what people expect. In an instant, in their eyes, I turn into the sociopathic killer I was believed to be forty years ago.","author":"John Elder Robison","tags":["act","aging","asperger-s","asperger-s-syndrome","aspergers","average","emotional","fool","killer","normal","normalcy","older","person","reaction","sociopath","sociopathic","sociopathy","taught","teach"],"id":144984,"author_id":"John+Elder+Robison"},{"text":"I take criticism to heart. The words hit me literally and it hurts. It can take me a long time to recover from it.","author":"Tina J. Richardson","tags":["aspergers","autism","criticism"],"id":170534,"author_id":"Tina+J.+Richardson"},{"text":"She became an illusion of herself. It was easier to cope with people that way.","author":"Tina J. Richardson","tags":["anxiety","aspergers","autism"],"id":178308,"author_id":"Tina+J.+Richardson"},{"text":"All people, whether Aspie or neuro-typical are predisposed by their society to make guesses, jump to conclusions and then seek to defend those conclusions, regardless of logic or changing circumstance. This is sloppy, illogical thinking which may not hinder your life too much, under normal circumstances. But if you want to be a great detective, then such thinking will absolutely ruin your chances.","author":"Alexei Maxim Russell","tags":["asperger","aspergers","aspergers-syndrome","autism","autism-spectrum","deduction","detective","detectives","guess","guessing","logic","reasoning"],"id":197208,"author_id":"Alexei+Maxim+Russell"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":27,"pages":3,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}