Quotes from Matt Haig

To say how I was feeling would lead to feeling more of what I was feeling.

There is no shame in not watching news. There is no shame in not going on Twitter. There is no shame in disconnecting.

If you have children and love one more than another, work at it. They will know, even if it's by a single atom less. A single atom is all you need to make a very big explosion.

Misery, like yoga, is not a competitive sport

Beauty--be not caused," said Emily Dickinson. "It is." In one way she was wrong. The scattering of light over a long distance creates a sunset. The crashing of ocean waves on a beach is created by tides, which are themselves the result of gravitational forces exerted by the sun and the moon and the rotation of the Earth. Those are causes. The mystery lies in how those things become beautiful.

She didn't want to die. And she didn't want to live any other life than the one that was hers. The one that could be a messy struggle, but it was her messy struggle. A beautiful messy struggle.

The past is never gone. It just hides.

I think life always provides reasons to not die, if we listen hard enough. Those reasons can stem from the past—the people who raised us, maybe, or friends or lovers—or from the future—the possibilities we would be switching off.

Well, what the fuck would an extraterrestrial life form want to come here for?

Doing one thing differently is often the same as doing everything differently. Actions can't be reversed within a lifetime, however much we try

Confine your imagination. Do not lose yourself to dangerous daydreams. Do not sit and ponder and dwell on a life you are not living. Do something active. Exercise. Work harder. Answer your emails. Fill your diary with harmless social activities. By doing, we stop ourselves imagining. And imagining for us is a fast-moving car heading toward a cliff.

So most of what we know now will be disproved or reassessed in the future. That is how science works, not through blind faith, but continual doubt.

Feeling you lack things doesn't make you less complete.

Illness has a lot to teach wellness. But when I am ill I forget these things. The trick is to keep hold of that knowledge. To turn recovery into prevention. To live how I live when I am ill, without being ill.

Monsters are real," Stephen King said. "And ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.

Don't do the work people expect you to do. Do the work you want to do. You only get one life. It's always best to live it as yourself.

Maybe in some lives you just float around and expect nothing else and don't even try to change. Maybe that was most lives.

When it comes to our minds, awareness is very often the solution itself.

And yet, everything was different. And it was different because she no longer felt she was there simply to serve the dreams of other people. She no longer felt like she had to find sole fulfilment as some imaginary perfect daughter or sister or partner or wife or mother or employee or anything other than a human being, orbiting her own purpose, and answerable to herself.

I was drinking a cup of tea. I actually enjoyed tea. It was so much better than coffee. It tasted like comfort.

What if there are more than two roads diverging in the wood? What if there are more roads than trees? What if there is no end to the choices you could make? What would Robert Frost do then?

Better to be disliked for being you, than being liked for being someone else.

If you want to conquer the anxiety of life, live in the moment. Live in the breath.

The best way to think of the ageing process in relation to a human face is to imagine a map of an area of innocent land which slowly becomes a city with many long and winding routes.