Quotes from Matt Haig

To know which path to take, it helps to take a few wrong ones.

The problem is not that the world is a mess, but that we expect it to be otherwise.

If the stone falls hard enough the ripples last a lifetime.

Do not watch TV aimlessly. Do not go on social media aimlessly. Always be aware of what you are doing, and why you are doing it. Don't value TV less. Value it more. Then you will watch it less. Unchecked distractions will lead you to distraction.

To be part of nature was to be part of the will to live.

As civilisation advances, so does indifference.

Don't absorb criticism from people you wouldn't go to for advice.

But people get over grief. They get over even the most serious grief in a matter of years. If not get over then at least live beside. And the way they do this is by investing in other people, through friendship, through family, through teaching, through love.

It sometimes feels as if we have temporarily solved the problem of scarcity and replaced it with the problem of excess.

True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing.' – Socrates (after losing our quiz!!!!)

The world exists in you. Your experience of the world isn't this objective unchangeable thing called 'The World'. No. Your experience of the world is your interaction with it, your interpretation of it. To a certain degree we all make our own worlds. We read it in our own way. But also: we can, to a degree, choose what to read. We have to work out what about the world makes us feel sad or scared or confused or ill or calm or happy.

This, I soon discovered, was a typical pub. The 'pub' was an invention of humans living in England, designed as compensation for the fact that they were humans living in England.

I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. Sylvia Plath

But if everyone was made to look perfect, then no one would be special because being special meant being different, by offering something that wasn't on offer elsewhere.

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.

Impossible. An old elf swearword.

One day, if you get into a position of power, tell people this: just because you can, it doesn't mean you should. There is a power and a beauty in unproved conjectures, unkissed lips and unpicked flowers.

I have to admit that humans waste a lot of their time - almost all of it - with hypothetical stuff. I could be rich. I could be famous. I could have been hit by that bus. I could have been born with fewer moles and bigger breasts. I could have spent more of my youth learning foreign languages. They must exercise the conditional tense more than any other known life form.

I don't think your problem was stage fright. Or wedding fright. I think your problem was life fright.

The key is in accepting your thoughts, all of them, even the bad ones. Accept thoughts, but don't become them.

You get up. You put on your clothes. And then you put on your personality. Choose wisely.

Pain is a debt paid off with time.

The bottom of the valley never provides the clearest view.

Well, that you can choose choices but not outcomes.