Quotes from Matt Haig

But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself. —Albert Camus, A Happy Death

Life is the people who love you.

Language gives us the power to voice our experience, to reconnect with the world, and to change our own and other people's lives

The truth is, you see, however much they would beg to disagree humans don't actually like to win. Or rather, they like winning for ten seconds, but if they keep on winning, they end up actually having to think about other things, like life and death. The only thing humans like less than winning is losing, but at least something can be done about that. With absolute winning, there is nothing to be done. They just have to deal with it.

The way out of your mind is via the world.

There are as many versions of a book as there are readers.

She is smiling at me. It is a wistful smile. The kind of smile no one is capable of before the age of forty. The kind that contains sadness and defiance and amusement all at once.

To teach feels like you are a guardian of time itself, protecting the future happiness of the world via the minds that are yet to shape it.

Where there were books, there was always the temptation to open them.

History is a branch of mathematics. So is literature. Economics is a branch of religion.

But while choice is infinite, our lives have time spans. We can't live every life. We can't watch every film or read every book or visit every single place on this sweet earth. Rather than being blocked by it, we need to edit the choice in front of us. We need to find out what is good for us, and leave the rest. We don't need another world. Everything we need is here, if we give up thinking we need everything.

I craved knowledge. I craved facts. I searched for them like lifebuoys in the sea. But statistics are tricky things.

Imagine yourself as a baby. You would look at that baby and think they lacked nothing. That baby came complete. Their value was innate from their first breath. Their value did not depend on external things like wealth or appearance or politics or popularity. It was the infinite value of a human life.

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams,' Thoreau had said. 'Live the life you've imagined.

Yes, there had been a void inside me, but voids were underrated. Voids were empty of love but also pain. Emptiness was not without its advantages. You could move around in emptiness.

When you stay too long in one 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.

Be humble because you are made of earth. Be noble, for you are made of stars. Serbian proverb

it would have made things a lot easier if we understood there was no way of living that can immunize you against sadness. And that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness. You can't have one without the other. Of course, they come in different degrees and quantities. But there is no life where you can be in a state of sheer happiness for ever. And imagining there is just breeds more unhappiness in the life you're in.

Crying releases stress hormones. Swearing increases pain tolerance. Fury can motivate us into action. Feel what you feel. Silence and smiles aren't the only way to respond to pain. Sometimes it is good to howl.

No wonder they were a species of primitives. By the time they have read enough books to actually reach a state of knowledge where they can do anything with it, they are dead.

Don't be a perfectionist. Humans are imperfect. Human work is imperfect. Be less robot, more human. Be more imperfect. Evolution happens through mistakes.

Every book written is the product of a human mind in a particular state.

Nothing is stronger then a small hope that doesn't give up

It is hard to predict, isn't it?' she asked, looking blankly in front of her as she moved a black bishop across the board to take a white pawn. 'The things that will make us happy'.