Quotes from Matt Haig

The price for being intelligent enough to be the first species to be fully aware of the cosmos might just be a capacity to feel a whole universe's worth of darkness.

There is no panacea, or utopia, there is just love and kindness and trying, amid the chaos, to make things better where we can.

I read and read and read with an intensity I'd never really known before. I mean, I'd always considered myself to be a person who liked books. But there is a difference between liking books and needing them. I needed books.

A quark is not the smallest thing. The smallest thing is the regret you will feel on your deathbed for not having worked more.

We have the knowledge to realise we are just a mess 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.

As the great writer Anne Lamott puts it: "Lighthouses don't go running all over an island for boats to save; they just stand there shining.

Do you know how magic works? The kind of magic that gets reindeer to fly in the sky? The kind that helps Father Christmas travel around the world in a single night? The kind that can stop time and make dreams come true? Hope. That's how. Without hope, there would be no magic.

So he knew terrible things- even the most terrible things-couldn't stop the world from turning. Life went on. And he made a promise to himself that, when he grew older, he'd try to be like his mother. Colourful, and happy and kind and full of joy.

Sometimes things are a change for the better and the worse at the same time, like the internet. Or the electric keyboard. Or pre-chopped garlic. Or the theory of relativity.

If we demand the future be free from suffering in order to be happy; we can't be happy.

And for three weeks I was trapped in my own mind again. But this time, I had weapons. One of them, maybe the most important, was this knowledge: I have been ill before, then well again. Wellness is possible.

Light was everything. Sunshine, windows with the blinds open. Pages with short chapters and lots of white space and Short. Paragraphs. Light was everything.

She had shrunk for him and he still hadn't found the space he needed. No more.

We only know what we perceive.  Everything we perceive is ultimately just our perception of it. It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.

Stigma is particularly cruel for depressives, because stigma affects thoughts and depression is a disease of thoughts.

This was, I realized, a beautiful planet. Maybe it was the most beautiful of all. But beauty creates its own troubles. You look at a waterfall or an ocean or a sunset, and you find yourself wanting to share it with someone.

Another strange thing was how absence had intensified my feelings for her. How I craved the sweet everyday reality of just being with her, of having a mundane conversation about how our days had been. The gentle but unbettered comfort of coexistence. I couldn't think of a better purpose for the universe than for her to be in it.

By thinking of the cloud, I thirsted for the raindrop.

In a thousand years, if humans survive that long, everything you know will have been disproved. And replaced by even bigger myths.

I was already feeling a kind of homesickness for a present I was still living

Most gossip is envy in disguise.

I looked at the transprent yellow liquid in the glass. I tasted it and tasted fermentation. In other words I tasted life on Earth. For everything that lives here ferments, ages, becomes diseased. But as things made their decline from ripeness they could taste wonderful, I realised

Forever, Emily Dickinson said, is composed of nows. But how do you inhabit the now you are in? How do you stop the ghosts of all the other nows from getting in? How, in short, do you live?

It wasn't just the loss of people I had known but also the loss of myself. The loss of who I had been when I had been with them.