Below are 24 quotes from autistic individuals. Read 2 a month for a year of tips and insights.
- Autism can’t define me. I define autism. – Kerry Magro
- I might hit developmental and societal milestones in a different order than my peers, but I am able to accomplish these small victories on my own time. – Haley Moss
- I know we’re not supposed to judge people by their appearances. But people tend to make exceptions for autistic people. I know this because whenever you tell me I “don’t look autistic”, what you’re saying is I’m not matching your expectations of what an autistic person is supposed to look like – Chris Bonnello
- We cry, we scream, we hit out and break things. But still, we don’t want you to give up on us. Please, keep battling alongside us. – Naoki Higashida
- Avoiding eye contact is one of the things I find myself automatically doing to minimize the quantity of incoming sensory information. – Judy Endow
- If there were no rules specified, for example: only cross the road at a crossing, then I invented my own rules. – Wenn Lawson
- Autistic people are individuals. We are not all maths geniuses, we don’t all like trains. I am hopeless with technology and much prefer painting. There is no ‘typical Autistic.’ But I think we probably all like being respected and validated. – Jeanette Purkis
- My fear is that if I don’t mask, push through & show how capable I am, I won’t be offered opportunities in the future or be valued the same. – Emily Swiatek
- If you got rid of all the autism genetics, you wouldn’t have science or art. All you would have is a bunch of social ‘yak yaks’ – Temple Grandin
- No matter how hard I try to learn from other people or copy what others are doing, I can’t quite get it right. It’s like living in a foreign country and not knowing the language. – Rosie King
- The thing is I don’t think in a language, and animals don’t think in a language. It’s sensory based thinking, thinking in pictures, thinking in smells, thinking in touches. It’s putting these sensory based memories into categories. – Temple Grandin
- I have an extremely visual mind, like a third eye in my head, and doctors have said I have some of the highest visual learning skills they’ve ever seen. – Rosie King
- One reason I’ve done as well as I have is early intervention – I was ‘got at’ very young – Ros Blackburn
- I cannot speak. For whatever reason God has intended for me to be mute. Many people might believe that I cannot think, but despite their thinking I can. What’s more is that I listen. – Neal Katz
- I am a very visual thinker. I think in picutres not words. You might have noticed that I don’t have much inflection in my voice. – Alix Generous
- Playing the piano makes me very happy. Playing Beethoven is like your feelings – all of them – exploding. – Mikey Allcock
- Autistic people live in a keenly sensory world. Their self-stimulatory behaviours are all conencted with senses. – Jasmine Lee O’Neill
- Routine is a pivotal part of my daily life and any deviation, however slight, can cause great discomfort to me. – Nathan Cornfield
- I have a very uneven profile of strengths and weaknesses, where often my strengths mask my very real difficulties – Ros Blackburn
- I don’t really understand why it’s considered normal to stare at someone’s eyeballs – John Elder Robison
- My mind doesn’t stop; it spins and shifts in different directions creating webs of patterns, linked by varying hues. – Michael Bowring
- I like teachers that can explain concepts really well so I do not have to reread or ask too many questions during a lecture. Shorter sentences are easier to understand than long ones. But, if I do need to ask questions, please don’t get annoyed or upset if I ask “too many” questions. Getting my questions answered does a lot to lessen my anxiety. – Ethan Hirschberg
- It’s hard to filter when there are lots of other sounds going on, eg ‘background noise’ as well as the conversation I’m meant to be a part of. I feel like I end up processing everything … it’s very stressful, irritating and overwhelming. – Alis Rowe
- (About meltdowns) I feel trapped. I have a weird tension in my head or my arms I want to get out. Everything around me suddenly feels extremely real like I’ve just come out of the water, I feel all sorts of emotions all at once and I want to run away from them all. I lose sight of what is socially appropriate and start to say things I either don’t mean or something I’ve wanted to say deep down. Whenever that happens I end up hurting someone or confusing everyone. – Chi
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Editor’s note
Our readers might find some more quotes to consider in the link below –