Mr. Nobody Quotes

“Sometimes the most terrifying thing is our own imagination.”
― Catherine Steadman, Mr. Nobody

“Recognition is a complex neurological process and humans are very, very good at masking the absence of it. People adapt around memory losses. They rely on other things—visual cues, social cues—they get good at reading people, situations; they find ways around things until an answer presents itself.”
― Catherine Steadman, Mr. Nobody

“first of all, Mike, you don’t work for THE Times, okay? You write for the fucking Brancaster Times,”
― Catherine Steadman, Mr. Nobody

“I just don’t know why I’m doing any of it anymore. You know?” she coos. “I used to try so hard to please him, to make him love me…but now—” She breaks off, lost in thought.
“Now?” I prompt.
“Now I realize. We can’t change people, can we?”
“No. No, we can’t,” I answer. “People have to change themselves.”
― Catherine Steadman, Mr. Nobody

“I still find it strange how easy it is to see solutions for others but not for yourself. Those years I slogged out sixteen-hour days, no weekends, no holidays, no life—it’s hard to recognize compulsion when you’re in the thick of it. The compulsion to fill the hole you left, Dad. It’s only now I really see it. I’ve been replaying the same story. I’ve been replaying you, with every patient, replaying the imagined moment I could have fixed you. Over and over again. Classic PTSD. But I couldn’t have fixed you then. And I can’t fix you now.
I didn’t see you that night at the bottom of the stairs, Dad, you didn’t put your coat on and leave; you were just a figment of my addled brain. You’re gone.
At the back of my mind, I suppose, I always knew you died, but I was so enamored with the idea you might come back one day and explain it all. Explain it all away. Tell me you didn’t do what you did. Or I’d explain it for you, through someone else, through my job; finally I’d work out why you did what you did. Why people do the things they do. Somehow I’d uncover your reasons. But I’ve been scrambling around for too long now trying to gather together the broken pieces of you, the shattered fragments you left all over our lives. I’ve been so focused on putting those pieces—and you—back together again that somewhere along the way I came apart at the seams.
But now it’s time for me to put myself back together.”
― Catherine Steadman, Mr. Nobody

“I’ll let you in on a secret they tell us at medical school: Sometimes things can’t be fixed. Sometimes things must be lived with.”
― Catherine Steadman, Mr. Nobody

“Dissociative personality disorder used to be called multiple personality disorder, or MPD. They renamed it in the nineties because there was this common misconception, even in the medical community, that MPD meant a patient had more than one personality. It doesn’t mean that, it means that the patient has less than one personality. It is a fragmenting or a splintering of identity. Shards of an independent self.”
― Catherine Steadman, Mr. Nobody

“there are no miracles—there are only people and their actions.”
― Catherine Steadman, Mr. Nobody

“I don’t really watch the news. I mean, I hardly have time to do my own laundry and the last thing I want to do with the little free time I do have is fill it with problems I can’t solve.”
― Catherine Steadman, Mr. Nobody

“And if you do insist on continuing to visit your father, I’m going to have to ask you to stop deliberately agitating and upsetting him. He’s a vulnerable adult and what you’re doing is bordering on psychological abuse.”
― Catherine Steadman, Mr. Nobody

“I’m not lying to him. I’m just not being an asshole. We can’t inform Howard that his wife is dead every time he asks us, it would be beyond cruelty. Why repeat the worst day of this man’s life every day of his life?”
― Catherine Steadman, Mr. Nobody

“I’m not lying to him. I’m just not being an asshole.”
― Catherine Steadman, Mr. Nobody

“I say it because he is my patient and it will make him feel really good, and he won’t remember I said it tomorrow.”
― Catherine Steadman, Mr. Nobody

“People want doctors to be like priests. They want hope delivered with authority.”
― Catherine Steadman, Mr. Nobody

“PTSD patients relive their traumatic event; they replay it every time something triggers the memory. The same event over and over in their heads. Anything can trigger it, a face, a tone of voice, a sound. It’s called hyperarousal and it’s one of the key symptoms of PTSD.”
― Catherine Steadman, Mr. Nobody

“Better by far you should forget and smile Than that you should remember and be sad. —CHRISTINA ROSSETTI, “REMEMBER”
― Catherine Steadman, Mr. Nobody

“A fitting reminder never to hold on to anything too hard in the future, I suppose—people, places, the past.”
― Catherine Steadman, Mr. Nobody

“People don’t want truth from us doctors, not really; they may think they do but they don’t. People want doctors to be like priests. They want hope delivered.”
― Catherine Steadman, Mr. Nobody

“He doesn’t feel sad. He doesn’t feel like the kind of person who would kill himself. But then, maybe nobody ever does?”
― Catherine Steadman, Mr. Nobody

“Sometimes the most terrifying thing is our own imagination. The not knowing.”
― Catherine Steadman, Mr. Nobody

“Houses aren't haunted, people are.”
― Catherine Steadman, Mr. Nobody

“And for a second, he's right there, so close, towering over me, in my personal space. I can smell him, the scent of rain and fresh fabric softener.”
― Catherine Steadman, Mr. Nobody

“feel my anger metastasizing inside me.”
― Catherine Steadman, Mr. Nobody

“winches”
― Catherine Steadman, Mr. Nobody