Quotes from Matt Haig

Maybe Shakespeare was right. Maybe all the world was a stage. Maybe without the act everything would fall apart. The key to happiness wasn't being yourself, because what did that even mean? Everyone had many selves. No. The key to happiness is finding the lie that suits you best.

Goals are the source of misery. An unattained goal causes pain, but actually achieving it brings only a brief satisfaction.

Everything in life is uncertain. That is how you know you are existing in the world, the uncertainty. Of course, this is why we sometimes want to return to the past, because we know it, or think we do. It's a song we've heard.

Living with anxiety, turning up, and doing stuff with anxiety takes a strength most people will never know.

It seems impossible to live without hurting people.' 'That's because it is.' 'So why live at all?' 'Well, in fairness, dying hurts people too.

In order to get over a problem it helps to look at it. You can't climb a mountain that you pretend isn't there.

Every life contains many millions of decisions. Some big, some small. But every time one decision is taken over another, the outcomes differ. An irreversible variation occurs, which in turn leads to further variations

She was a waterfall of apologies. She was drowning in herself.

The sky, like the sea, can anchor us. It says: hey, it's okay, there is something bigger than your life that you are part of, and it's – literally – cosmic.

Minds have their own weather systems. You are in a hurricane. Hurricanes run out of energy eventually. Hold on.

The hardest question I have ever been asked is: 'How do I stay alive for other people if I have no one?' The answer is that you stay alive for other versions of you. For the people you will meet, yes, sure, but also the people you will be.

Hope isn't the same thing as happiness. You don't need to be happy to be hopeful. You need instead to accept the unknowability of the future, and that there are versions of that future which could be better than the present. Hope, in its simplest form, is the acceptance of possibility.

Be a mystery, not a demographic. Be someone a computer could never quite know.

The tea seemed to be making things better. It was a hot drink made of leaves, used in times of crisis as a means of restoring normality.

Perhaps a wish was just a hope with better aim.

Anxiety takes away all the commas and full stops we need to make sense of ourselves.

That is the whole thing with the future. You don't know. At some point you have to accept that you don't know. You have to stop flicking ahead and just concentrate on the page you are on.

Life is hard. It may be beautiful and wonderful but it is also hard.

New technology, on Earth, just means something you will laugh at in five years. Value the stuff you won't laugh at in five years. Like love. Or a good poem. Or a song. Or the sky.

There comes a time when the only way to start living is to tell the truth. To be who you really are, even if it is dangerous.

Tragedy is just comedy that hasn't come to fruition. One day we will laugh at this. We will laugh at everything.

There is no rejection, there is only redirection.

To see something, you have to believe in it. Really believe it. That's the first elf rule. You can't see something you don't believe in. Now try your hardest and see if you can see what you have been looking for.

It is not the length of life that matters. It's the depth. But while burrowing, keep the sun above you.