Mark Haddon Quotes

I don't think good and evil are polarized.

In real life, the hardest aspect of the battle between good and evil is determining which is which.

What if evil doesn't really exist? What if evil is something dreamed up by man, and there is nothing to struggle against except out own limitations? The constant battle between our will, our desires, and our choices?

The border between good and evil is terribly fuzzy.

So we reach into the raging chaos, and we cling to it, and we tell ourselves it has meaning, and that the world is good, and we are not evil, and we will all go home in the end.

To get art nowadays, in cinema or books or anything, that grapples with the possibility of a meaningless universe... it just doesn't happen any more. In even the most indie of the indie films, everything has to come to some kind of neat conclusion.

One concept corrupts and confuses the others. I am not speaking of the Evil whose limited sphere is ethics; I am speaking of the infinite.

My idea of what's good and bad and right and wrong is maybe greyer than most, and I like writing about that.

I love the gray area between right and wrong.

We should not be simply fighting evil in the name of good, but struggling against the certainties of people who claim always to know where good and evil are to be found.

Even people that are evil believe what they're doing is good. I don't agree with those people, but it's about understanding that there are those kinds of points of view.

Being against evil doesn't make you good. Tonight I was against it and then I was evil myself. I could feel it coming just like a tide... I just want to destroy them. But when you start taking pleasure in it you are awfully close to the thing you're fighting.

What were good and evil, really, but stupid categories? Stupid categories that restricted people and punished or rewarded them based on how they responded to their own natures, natures they really didn't have any way to control.

If the fiercest conglomerate monsters had souls, with all that implied, who could condemn them as evil?

You know how confusing the whole good-evil concept is for me.

I used to think I knew what was right and what was wrong, and who the good guys are, and who the bad guys are. Then the world got very gray, and I didn't know anything for a long time

To be confronted with a simple and unqualified evil is no doubt a kind of luxury.

Good and evil both increase at compound interest.

Focus on impact, not approval. If you believe you can change the world, which I hope you do, do what you believe is right and expect resistance and expect attackers. Keep calm and carry on!

To say murder is wrong is as much a statement of faith as 'I believe that God said murder is wrong' is a statement of faith

A clear division between good and evil, right and wrong, would simplify everything, but life was rarely simple.

They were on the side of the angels, even if the angels weren't entirely sure that this was a good thing.

Virtue, I grant you, is an empty boast; But shall the dignity of vice be lost?

On some other world, possibly it is different. Better. There are clear good and evil alternatives. Not these obscure admixtures, these blends, with no proper tool by which to untangle the components.

Inability to tell good from evil is the greatest worry of man's life.