Quotes from Matt Haig

Failure is a trick of the light.

How much extra happiness am I acquiring? Why am I wanting so much more than I need? Wouldn't I be happier learning to appreciate what I already have?

You don't have to be positive. You don't have to feel guilty about fear or sadness or anger. You don't stop the rain by telling it to stop. Sometimes you just have to let it pour, let it soak you to your skin. It never rains forever. And know that, however wet you get, you are not the rain. You are not the bad feelings in your head. You are the person experiencing the storm.

So every human inhabitant on this freak wonder of a planet shares the same core. I am you and you are me. We are alone, but not alone. We are trapped by time, but also infinite. Made of flesh, but also stars.

She realised that she hadn't tried to end her life because she was miserable, but because she had managed to convince herself that there was no way out of her misery. That, she supposed, was the basis of depression as well as the difference between fear and despair. Fear was when you wandered into a cellar and worried that the door would close shut. Despair was when the door closed and locked behind you.

The main advantage of books over life is that they can be redrafted and redrafted, whereas life, alas, is always a first draft.

Sometimes, to be yourself you will have to forget yourself and become something else. Your character is not a fixed thing. You will sometimes have to move to keep up with it.

She knew that everything humans see is a simplification. A human sees the world in three dimensions. That is a simplification. Humans are fundamentally limited, generalising creatures, living on auto-pilot, who straighten out curved streets in their minds, which explains why they get lost all the time.

It is easier to learn to be soaked and happy than to learn how to stop the rain.

Aim not to get more stuff done. Aim to have less stuff to do. Be a work minimalist. Minimalism is about doing more with less. So much of working life seems to be about doing less with more. Activity isn't always the same as achievement.

We kissed and I closed my eyes and inhaled lavender and her, and I felt so terrified and so in love that I realised they - the terror, the love - were one in the same thing.

That was the familiar lesson of time. Everything changes and nothing changes.

Other animals don't have progress, they say. But the human mind itself doesn't progress. We stay the same glorified chimpanzees, just with ever bigger weapons. We have the knowledge to realise we are just a mass of quanta and particles, like everything else is, and yet we keep trying to separate ourselves from the universe we live in, to give ourselves a meaning above that of a tree or a rock or a cat or a turtle.

Life begins,' Sartre once wrote, 'on the other side of despair.

You shouldn't have been born. Your existence is as close to impossible as can be. To dismiss the impossible is to dismiss yourself.

Truth is a straight line you sometimes need to curve, you should know that by now.

A pawn is a queen-in-waiting. All you need to do is find a way to keep moving forward. One square after another.

The whole of consumerism is based on us wanting the next thing rather than the present thing we already have. This is an almost perfect recipe for unhappiness.

Maybe that's what all lives were, though. Maybe even the most seemingly perfectly intense or worthwhile lives ultimately felt the same. Acres of disappointment and monotony and hurts and rivalries but with flashes of wonder and beauty.

You understand quite completely that the main lesson of history is: humans don't learn from history. The twenty-first century could still turn out to be a bad cover version of the twentieth, but what could we do? People's minds across the world were filling with utopias that could never overlap. It was a recipe for disaster, but, alas, a familiar one. Empathy was waning, as it often had. Peace was made of porcelain, as it always was.

I have long convinced myself that the piano is like a drug, seductive and strong, and it can mess you up, it can awaken dead emotions, it can drown you in your lost selves. It is a nervous breakdown waiting to happen.

Flowers, after love, must have been the best advert planet Earth had going for it.

Forcing yourself to see the world through love's gaze can be healthy. Love is an attitude to life. It can save us.

I couldn't believe it. I had broken the law simply by not wearing clothes.