Quotes from Matt Haig

You are not the only one with sorrows in this world. Don't hoard them like they are precious. There is always plenty of them to go around.

There is no point spending an entire life trying to win the love you didn't feel when you needed it. You sometimes just have to let go of an old story and start your own. Give yourself some love. You can't change the past. You can't change other people. You can change you though. You narrate this story. So start to write a new chapter.

I don't know why people say sorry when they havent done the thing they are saying sorry for. It is like everyone in the world is a little bit to blame for everything.

Maybe instead of worrying about upgrading technology and slowly allowing ourselves to be cyborgs we should have a little peek at how we could upgrade our ability to cope with all this change.

The life of a human, according to the Scottish philosopher David Hume, was of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster. But if it was important enough for David Hume to write that thought down, then maybe it was important enough to aim to do something good. To help preserve life, in all its forms.

Well, honesty gets you locked up in a psych ward.

I feel a swell of pride. This. This right here is why I wanted to become a teacher. To know that it is possible to change the world for the better, in however small a way.

I sometimes feel like my head is a computer with too many windows open.

Don't worry about things you can't control.

Don't let anyone or anything make you feel you aren't enough.

I did not know how to be me, my strange and unusual self, without her. I had tried it, of course. I had existed whole years without her, but that was all it had been. An existence. A book with no words.

We are all potential depressives, but that is never going to be all we are.

Love now. Love right now. If you have someone to love, do it this instant LOVE FEARLASSLY.

No is a good word. It keeps you sane. In an age of overload, no is really yes. It is yes to having the space you need to live.

Two mirrors, opposite and facing each other at perfectly parallel angles, viewing themselves through the other, the view as deep as infinity... Love was a way to live forever in a single moment, and it was also a way to see yourself as you had never actually seen yourself, and made you realise – having done so – that this view was a more meaningful one than any of your previous self-perceptions and self-deceptions.

Love is scary because it pulls you in with an intense force, a supermassive black hole which looks like nothing from the outside but from the inside challenges every reasonable thing you know. You lose yourself, like I lost myself, in the warmest of annihilations.

Sex can damage love but love can't damage sex.

There is this idea that you either read to escape or you read to find yourself. I don't really see the difference. We find ourselves through the process of escaping... Rather than leave the mind entirely, words help us leave a mind, and give us the building blocks to build another one, similar but better, nearby to the old one but with firmer foundations, and very often a better view.

The universe tended towards chaos and entropy. That was basic thermodynamics. Maybe it was basic existence too.

You make the wrong decision in the present and it haunts you, just as the Treaty of Versaillles in nineteen nineteen sowed the ground for Hitler to take power in nineteen thirty-three, so every present moment is paying for a future one. Just one wrong turn can get you very lost. What you do in the present stays with you. It comes back. You don't get away with anything.

T)here are only two things that are true 100 out of 100 times and that is that you live and also that you die and every other thing is not true or false it is a mix. It is both. It is none.

The first rule of marriage: solve the mystery, end the love.

Don't say yes to things you wish you had the confidence to say no to.

in a world trying to increasingly isolate us from our environment and our true selves, books are our route to freedom, and to each other'.