Mark Haddon Quotes

You have to deduce a person's real feelings about a thing by a smile she does not know is on her face, by the way bitterness tightens muscles at a mouth's corner, or the way air is allowed to flow from the lungs.

when someone speaks he looks at a mouth, not eyes and their colors, which, it seems to him, will always alter depending on the light of a room, the minute of the day. Mouths reveal insecurity or smugness or any other point on the spectrum of character. For him they are the most intricate aspect of faces. He's never sure what an eye reveals. but he can read how mouths darken into callousness, suggest tenderness. One can often misjudge an eye from its reaction to a simple beam of sunlight.

Everything that we think comes across in our eyes. Our eyes really are the windows to our souls, and that's why at least I can tell when somebody doesn't mean what they're saying - if you just look at them in the eye.

Your face and head give more information about you than any other body part.

A man's face as a rule says more, and more interesting things, than his mouth, for it is a compendium of everything his mouth will ever say, in that it is the monogram of all this man's thoughts and aspirations.

I think the eyes are very revealing and can expose a lot about a persons mood or character.

There's as much revealed in the way a person lifts a glass as in what they say about some political issue.

When people walk in a room, the way they sit or they talk, that itself tells me a story.

Make it your profitable habit to carefully study facial expressions. You can see the entire human drama in a face; you can tell its owner's history.

I don't really go on what people say so much; I go on their voice. I go on their energy at the time. I go on how close their arms are folded into their chest.

Our human face happens to be one of the most powerful channels that we all use to communicate social and emotional states: everything from enjoyment, surprise, empathy, and curiosity.

People call me the human emoji because I think people recognize that if I'm ever thinking something or feeling a certain emotion, it goes straight to my face. So if I'm happy, you'll know I'm happy, and if I'm mad, you'll know I'm mad just by looking at me.

My body language, it doesn't have anything to do with my coaches or my teammates.

Body language and tone of voice - not words - are our most powerful assessment tools.

The mouth may lie, alright, but the face it makes nonetheless tells the truth.

The hand will often reveal more than the countenance.

I have noticed that if you look carefully at people's eyes the first five seconds they look at you, the truth of their feelings will shine through for just an instant before it flickers away.

Without sound, celebration and grief look nearly the same.

% of what you understand in a conversation is read through the body, not the words.

You could slap his wrist for saying it, but then he said it with his face, and you could spank him for making faces, but then he said it with his eyes, and there were limits to correction-no way, in the end, to penetrate behind the blue irises and eradicate a boy's disgust.

Well, usually when a person shakes their head," said McGonagall coldly, "they mean 'no.' So unless Miss Edgecombe is using a form of sign language as yet unknown to humans.

Listening to someone talk isn't at all like listening to their words played over on a machine. What you hear when you have a face before you is never what you hear when you have before you a winding tape.

In the hours that followed, I learned that Ademic hand gestures did not actually represent facial expressions. It was nothing so simple as that. For example a smile can mean you're amused, happy, grateful, or satisfied. You can smile to comfort someone. You can smile because you're content or because you're in love. A grimace or a grin look similar to a smile, but they mean entirely different things. Imagine trying to teach someone how to smile. Imagine trying to describe what different smiles mean and when, precisely, to use them in conversation. It's harder than learning to walk.

One can lie with the mouth, but with the accompanying grimace one nevertheless tells the truth.

Faces are as legible as books, only with these circumstances to recommend them to our perusal, that they are read in much less time, and are much less likely to deceive us.