Quotes from Matt Haig

Don't always try to be cool. The whole universe is cool. It's the warm bits that matter.

That's why everyone hates each other nowadays,' he reckoned. 'Because they are overloaded with non-friends friends. Ever heard about Dunbar's number?' And then he had told her about a man called Roger Dunbar at Oxford University, who had discovered that human beings were wired to know only a hundred and fifty people, as that was the average size of hunter-gatherer communities.

The most powerful moment in life is when you decide not to be scared anymore.

Never underestimate the big importance of small things,' Mrs Elm said. 'You must always remember that.

It may seem strange, falling in love with someone because of a gesture, but sometimes you can read an entire person in a single moment. The way you can study a grain of sand and understand the universe. Love at first sight might or might not be a thing, but love in a single moment is.

Accept feelings and accept that they are just that: feelings.

The present is known. The future is unknown. The present is solid. The future is abstract. Ruining the present by worrying about the future is like burning your most treasured possession simply because you might one day lose other possessions that you don't own yet.

For years now I had convinced myself that the sadness of the memories weighed more and lasted longer than the moments of happiness themselves. So I had, through some crude emotional mathematics, decided it was better not to seek out love or companionship or even friendship.

Everyone represses everything. Do you think any of these "normal" human beings really do exactly what they want to do all the time? 'Course not. It's just the same. We're middle-class and we're British. Repression is in our veins.

No, she felt homesick, not for a place, but for a time. Maybe it wasn't homesickness at all. Maybe it was timesickness. She just missed those days when she was younger - seven, six, five, four years old - when she didn't know so much about the world. She missed, most of all, her mother.

The weird thing about depression is that, even though you might have more suicidal thoughts, the fear of death remains the same. The only difference is that the pain of life has rapidly increased. So when you hear about someone killing themselves it's important to know that death wasn't any less scary for them. It wasn't a 'choice' in the moral sense. To be moralistic about it is to misunderstand.

That, I suppose, is a price we pay for love: the absorbing of another's pain as if our own.

Bertrand Russell wrote that 'To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three-parts dead'. Maybe that was her problem. Maybe she was just scared of living. But Bertrand Russell had more marriages and affairs than hot dinners, so perhaps he was no one to give advice.

All a writer can do is provide a match, and hopefully a dry one. The reader has to strike the flame into being.

I'm having a pretty shit time too, if we're doing the Misery Olympics.

You could eat in the finest restaurants, you could partake in every sensual pleasure, you could sing on stage in São Paulo to twenty thousand people, you could soak up whole thunderstorms of applause, you could travel to the ends of the Earth, you could be followed by millions on the internet, you could win Olympic medals, but this was all meaningless without love.

I think that basically we are all helping people. All the time. Every time any of us speaks openly about mental health, we are helping normalize an illness that is still handled with protective goggles and safety gloves.

Life is so infinitely hard. It involves a thousand tasks all at once. And I am a thousand different people, all fleeing away from the centre.

If someone loves you, let them. Believe in that love. Live for them, even when you feel there is no point.

It fascinated me how depression and anxiety overlap with post-traumatic stress disorder. Had we been through some trauma we didn't know about? Was the noise and speed of modern life the trauma for our caveman brains? Was I that soft? Or was life a kind of war most people didn't see?

One life of sadness was enough. What is the point of risking more?

On Earth, incidentally, civilization is the result of a group of humans coming together and suppressing their instincts.

Anne Sexton knows the mind, Walt Whitman knows grass, but Emily Dickinson knows everything.

Words don't capture, they release.