House Rules

by Jodi Picoult

Maybe the membrane between someone with Asperger’s and the rest of the world is not a shifting invisible seam of electrons but, instead, a see-through partition that allows only the illusion of feeling, instead of the actual thing.

I wonder why we never thought of this before: learning without socialization. It’s every Aspie’s dream.

facts are very important to me, more important than people are.

“Don’t you wish love was so strong it could come back to haunt you?”

I told him the story of my mother, who one night had woken up at 3:14 A.M. with a mouth full of violet petals and the scent of roses so thick in the air that she could not breathe. An hour later she was roused by a phone call: her own mother, a florist by trade, had died of a heart attack at 3:14 A.M.

prairie voles. They are part of only a tiny fraction of the animal kingdom that practice monogamy.

When prairie voles have sexual intercourse, the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin flood the brain. If the hormones are blocked, prairie voles behave more like those slutty montane voles.

Even more interesting, if prairie voles get injections of those hormones but then are prevented from having sex, they still become slavishly devoted to their would-be mates.

scientists have learned that, when it comes to love, a very tiny portion of the brain is actually involved.

the brain of a person in love doesn’t look like the brain of someone overcome by deep emotion. It looks like the brain of a person who’s been snorting coke.

all the jury is going to remember is this awkward boy who speaks in bursts of words and fidgets and doesn’t register appropriate emotion and can’t look them in the eye—all traditional expressions of guilt.