Quotes from Matt Haig

Rumi wrote in the twelfth century, 'The wound is the place where the light enters you.' (He also wrote: 'Forget safety. Live where you fear to live.')

Be curious. Question everything. A present fact is just a future fiction.

Let's occasionally look up from the spot in which we are because, wherever we happen to be standing, the sky above goes on for ever.

Be the complex elegance of a melting candle. Be a map with 10,000 roads. Be the orange at sunset that outclasses the pink of sunrise. Be the self that dares to be true.

As Hamlet said to Rosencrantz, "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

I unclip the lead from Abraham's collar and he stays by my side and looks up at me, confused, as if perplexed by the concept of freedom. I relate.

Don't feel guilty about being idle. More harm is probably done to the world through work than idleness. But perfect your idleness. Make it mindful.

So, you see? Sometimes regrets aren't based on fact at all. Sometimes regrets are just . . .' She searched for the appropriate term and found it. 'A load of bullshit.

To read, to seek, to know.

I pick it up and turn to a random page and read a sentence — 'Nothing fixes a thing so firmly in the memory as the wish to forget it'.

And yet, I was scared of falling asleep, because the moment I fell asleep my wounds would heal and right then I didn't want that to happen. Right then, I found a strange but real comfort in the pain.

40 pieces of helpful advice: No. 31 - Three in the morning is never the time to try and sort out your life.

You have to stop flicking ahead and just concentrate on the page you're on

It is easy to mourn the lives we aren't living. Easy to wish we'd developed other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we'd worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.

The future isn't real. The future is abstract. The now is all we know. One now after another now. The now is where we must live. There are billions of different versions of an older you. There is one version of the present you. Focus on that.

What you learn when you are ill, about what hurts, can then be applied to the better times, too. Pain is one hell of a teacher.

If one advances confidently,' Thoreau had written in Walden, 'in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

It looks like she is standing still but actually she is walking. She is breaking out of the chains of the past. Of slavery. Of civil war. And she is heading towards liberty. But she is caught for ever in that moment of stopped time. Look, can you see? Stop looking at the torch and look at her feet. She's moving, but not moving. Heading towards a better future, but not quite there yet.

Do you ever think 'how did I end up here?' Like you are in a maze and totally lost and it's all your fault because you were the one who made every turn?

How to be jolly even when times are bad 1. Eat more gingerbread, chocolate, jam and cake. 2. Say the word 'Christmas'. 3. Give someone a present. Like a toy, or a book, or a kind word, or a big hug. 4. Laugh, even if there is nothing to laugh about. Especially then. 5. Think of a happy memory. Or a happy future. 6. Wear something red. 7. Believe. (extract from How to Be Jolly: The Father Christmas Guide to Happiness)

It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out. But it is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It's the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people's worst enemy.

Books were about movement. They were about quests and journeys. Beginnings and middles and ends, even if not in that order. They were about new chapters. And leaving old ones behind.

All that humans create serves solely to lessen the terror of existence.

Now, Nikolas was a happy boy. Well, actually, no. He would have told you he was happy, if you asked him, and he certainly tried to be happy, but sometimes being happy is quite tricky. I suppose what I am saying is that Nikloas was a boy who believed in happiness, the way he believed in elves and trolls and pixies, but he had never actually seen an elf or a troll or a pixie, and he hadn't really seen proper happiness either. At least, not for a very long time. He didn't have it easy.