Quotes from Matt Haig

Life can sometimes feel like an overproduced song, with a cacophony of a hundred instruments playing all at once. Sometimes the song sounds better stripped back to just a guitar and a voice. Sometimes, when a song has too much happening, it's hard to hear the song at all.

It is the simplest, purest joy on earth, I realize, to make someone you care about laugh

She wondered how many Dans there were in the world, dreaming of things they would hate if they actually got them.

You don't need to deny the reality of the present in order to have hope, you just need to know the future is uncertain, and that life contains light as well as dark.

Continually looking for the meaning of life is like looking for the meaning of toast. It is sometimes better just to eat the toast.

He wrote me a prescription for more diazepam and advised I take things "one day at a time," as if there were another way for days to be experienced.

Human history is full of depressing things like colonization, disease, racism, sexism...inventions of things which they had no idea how to handle (the atomic bomb, the Internet, the semicolon)....And through it all there has always been some truly awful food.

Start fires. But only metaphorically. Unless you are cold and it's a safe setting. In which case: start fires.

If God exists, what is He but a mathematician?

For decades and decades and decades I have bemoaned people who say they feel old, but I now realise it is perfectly possible for anyone to feel old. All they need to do is become a teacher.

Silence is pain. But it is a pain with an exit route. When we can't speak, we can write. When we can't write, we can read. When we can't read, we can listen. Words are seeds. Language is a way back to life. And it is sometimes the most vital comfort we have.

Read Emily Dickinson. Read Graham Greene. Read Italo Calvino. Read Maya Angelou. Read anything you want. Just read. Books are possibilities. They are Escape Routes. They give you options when you have none. Each one can be a home for an uprooted mind.

In chess, as in life, possibility is the basis of everything. Every hope, every dream, every regret, every moment of living.

Because the possibility of pain is where love stems from.

It turned out to be near impossible to stand in a library and not want to pull things from the shelves.

And, just as it only takes a moment to die, it only takes a moment to live.

Unlike a book or a film depression doesn't have to be about something.

The longer you live, the more you realize that nothing is fixed. Everyone will become a refugee if they live long enough. Everyone would realize their nationality means little in the long run. Everyone would see their world views challenged and disproved. Everyone would realize the thing that defines a human being is being a human.

The wound is the place where the light enters you.

It might be a strange irony that the cure for worrying about ageing is sometimes, well, ageing .

One frustration with anxiety is that it is often hard to find a reason behind it. There may be no visible threat and yet you can feel utterly terrorized.

History isn't something you need to bring to life. History already is alive. We are history. History isn't politicians or kings and queens. History is everyone. It is everything. It's that coffee. You could explain much of the whole history of capitalism and empire and slavery just by talking about coffee. The amount of blood and misery that has taken place for us to sit here and sip coffee out of paper cups is incredible.

Librarians have knowledge. They guide you to the right books. The right worlds. They find the best places. Like soul-enhanced search engines." "Exactly. But you also have to know what you like. What to type into the metaphorical search box. And sometimes you have to try a few things before that becomes clear.

I've never had a coconut chilli Martini before,' I tell him. 'That's the thing with getting older. You run out of new things to try.' 'Oh, I don't know,' he says, still the optimist. 'I have lived beside one ocean or another most of my life and I have yet to see the same wave twice. It's the mana, you see. It's everywhere. It's never still. It keeps the world new. The whole planet is a coconut chilli Martini.