Quotes from Matt Haig

Blood doesn't satisfy cravings. It magnifies them.

A cow is a cow even if you call it beef.

Reading isn't important because it helps to get you a job. It's important because it gives you room to exist beyond the reality you're given. It is how humans merge.

Technology won't save humankind. Humans will.

Sip, don't gulp.

once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about. —Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

There was no use trying to think of a way, because it was impossible. And the only way you could make something impossible real wasn't through logic or sensible thinking. No. It was to believe it could be done.

I have been so many different people, played so many different roles in my life. I am not a person. I am a crowd in one body. I was people I hated and people I admired. I was exciting and boring and happy and infinitely sad.

When things are taken from us, the stuff that remains has more value.

while coal and diamonds are both carbon, coal is too impure to be able, under whatever pressure, to become a diamond. According to science, you start off as coal and you end up as coal. Maybe that was the real-life lesson.

I'm sorry,' I said. 'I'm sorry for everything. For the past and the future.' An apology, said while in dull pain, made me feel as close to human as it was possible to feel. I could almost have written a poem.

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.' Experience surrounds innocence and innocence can never be regained once lost.

Love is anxiety's greatest killer. Love is an outward force. It is our road out of our own terrors, because anxiety is an illness that wraps us up in our own nightmares. [...] Forcing yourself to see the world through love's gaze can be healthy. Love is an attitude to life. It can save us.

But this is how I remember these things, and all we can ever be is faithful to our memories of reality, rather than the reality itself, which is something closely related but never precisely the same thing.

Read poetry. Especially poetry by Emily Dickinson. It might save you. Anne Sexton knows the mind, Walt Whitman knows grass, but Emily Dickinson knows everything.

No physical appearance is worth not eating pasta for.

The price of imagination is pain.

Just give yourself one simple reminder that the world is full of wonders. Even if we are at a point in life where we can't appreciate things, it sometimes helps to remember there are things in this world to enjoy, when we are ready.

You are no less or more of a man or a woman or a human for having depression than you would be for having cancer or cardiovascular disease or a car accident.

Which is to say: don't kill yourself. Even when the darkness is total. Always know that life is not still. Time is space. You are moving through that galaxy. Wait for the stars.

Employment is becoming a dehumanizing process, as if humans existed to serve work, rather than work to serve humans.

Because words are a magic too, and they can contain everything.

To be part of nature was to be part of the will to live. When you stay too long in a place, you forget just how big an expanse the world is. You get no sense of the length of those longitudes and latitudes. Just as, she supposed, it is hard to have a sense of the vastness inside any one person. But once you sense that vastness, once something reveals it, hope emerges, whether you want it to or not, and it clings to you as stubbornly as lichen clings to rock.

You can't choose where you are born, you can't decide who won't leave you, you can't choose much. A life has unchangeable tides the same as history does. But there is still room inside it for choice. For decisions.