Quotes from Matt Haig

But this was England, a part of Earth where thinking about the weather was the chief human activity.

We don't have to play every game to know what winning feels like. We don't have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. We don't have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter

We only need to be one person. We only need to feel one existence. We don't have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility. So let's be kind to the people in our own existence.

There is only one of us. And we are all smaller than an internet. To enjoy life, we might have to stop thinking about what we will never be able to read and watch and say and do, and start to think of how to enjoy the world within our boundaries. To live on a human scale. To focus on the few things we can do, rather than the millions of things we can't. To not crave parallel lives. To find a smaller mathematics. To be a proud and singular one. An indivisible prime.

Well, that you can choose choices but not outcomes. But I stand by what I said. It was a good choice. It just wasn't a desired outcome.

That's what starts to happen, when you know it is possible for you to feel pain you have no control over. You become vulnerable. Because the possibility of pain is where love stems from.

We don't have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility. So let's be kind to the people in our own existence. Let's occasionally look up from the spot in which we are because, wherever we happen to be standing, the sky above goes on for ever.

Nora stared down at the small mole on her left hand. That mole had been through everything she'd been through. And it just stayed there, not caring. Just being a mole.

After the wine a realisation hit her with total clarity. She wasn't made for this life. Every move had been a mistake, every decision a disaster, every day a retreat from who she'd imagined she'd be. [...] Happy. Loved. Nothing.

I'm not interested in money or fame. I don't want to be on display like an animal in zoo.

So let's be kind to the people in our own existence. Let's occasionally look up from the spot in which we are because, wherever we happen to be standing, the sky above goes on for ever.

She realized that you could be as honest as possible in life, but people only see the truth if it is close enough to their reality. As Thoreau wrote, 'It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see

When she stopped playing, she looked thoughtful for a moment and said something like, 'I sometimes want to stop time. I sometimes want, in a happy moment, for a church bell never to ring again. I want not to ever have to go to the market again. I want for the starlings to stop flying in the sky. . . . But we are all at the mercy of time. We are all the strings, aren't we?

You sometimes have to look at what you know is there and discover the things right in front of you. The people you love.

Sometimes regrets aren't based on fact at all. Sometimes regrets are just . . .' She searched for the appropriate word and found it. 'A load of bullshit .

Happiness is an accident of self-acceptance. It's the warm breeze you feel when you open the door to who you are.

I told him that I had been under a lot of pressure at work and he understood. He then asked me some more questions. But as with all human questions, the answers were always there, inside them like protons inside an atom, for me to locate and give as my own independent thoughts.

In order to find the people who like you, it is first necessary to be you.

If people pick on you, they see something inside you that they are scared of. Something special

It's not what

La única manera de aprender es vivir.

One initial proposal I wanted to put to them was to swap things over. For instance, have five fun days and two not-fun days. That way – call me a mathematical genius – they would have more fun.

We weren't there to take over, we were there, in our own minds, to discover . And yet we had done what so often happened in the proud history of geographic discovery. We had found paradise. And then we had set it on fire.

I miss you", she said into the air, as if the spirits of every person she'd loved were in the room with her.