Quotes from Matt Haig

The craving for the thing is rarely met by the satisfaction of getting it. And so we crave more. And the cycle repeats. We are encouraged to want what will only make us want more. We are, in short, encouraged to be addicts.

Soon, I told myself, I would understand what the heavily articulated greeting "get off the fucking road you fucking wanker" actually meant.

I understand that the way you stop time is by stopping being ruled by it. I am no longer drowning in my past, or fearful of my future. How can I be? The future is you.

an ordinary life is not a guarantee of happiness.

Medication is an incredibly attractive concept. Not just for the person with depression, or the person running a pharmaceutical firm, but for society as a whole. It underlines the idea we have hammered into us by the hundred thousand TV ads we have seen that everything can be fixed by consuming things.

She didn't need a vineyard or a Californian sunset to be happy. She didn't even need a large house and the perfect family. She just needed potential. And she was nothing if not potential.

Progress,' wrote C.S. Lewis, 'means getting nearer to the place you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer.

Listen, emotions have logic. Without emotions humans wouldn't care for each other, and if they didn't care for each other, the species would have died out. To care for others is self-preservation. You care for someone and they care for you.

Remember that the key thing about life on earth is change. Cars rust. Paper yellows. Technology dates. Caterpillars become butterflies. Nights morph into days. Depression lifts.

Equidistant. Not aligned to one bank or the other. That was how she had felt most of her life. Caught in the middle. Struggling, flailing, just trying to survive while not knowing which way to go. Which path to commit to without regret.

Maybe that's what all lives were, though. Maybe even the most seemingly perfectly intense or worthwhile lives ultimately felt the same. Acres of disappointment and monotony and hurts and rivalries but with flashes of wonder and beauty. Maybe that was the only meaning that mattered. To be the world, witnessing itself. Maybe it wasn't the lack of achievements that had made her and her brother's parents unhappy, maybe it was the expectation to achieve in the first place.

Want is an interesting word. It means lack.

she wondered if her parents had ever been in love or if they had got married because marriage was something you did at the appropriate time with the nearest available person.

Basically, the key rule is, if you want to appear sane on Earth you have to be in the right place, wearing the right clothes, saying the right things, and only stepping on the right kind of grass.

Maybe happiness is about what we can give. Maybe happiness is not a butterfly we can catch with a net. Maybe there is no certain way to be happy. Maybe there are only maybes. If (as Emily Dickinson said) "Forever—is composed of Nows—," maybe the nows are made of maybes. Maybe the point of life is to give up certainty and to embrace life's beautiful uncertainty

We are infinitely better than the most perfect-looking bionic sex robots. We are humans. Let's not be ashamed to look like them.

Good. You are, of course, allowed to love food and music and champagne and rare sunny afternoons in October. You can love the sight of waterfalls and the smell of old books, but the love of people is off limits. Do you hear me? Don't attach yourself to people, and try to feel as little as you possibly can for those you do meet. Because otherwise you will slowly lose your mind . . .

Flowers she hadn't appreciated before, but which now mesmerised her with the most exquisite purple she had ever seen. As though the flowers weren't just colours but part of a language, notes in a glorious floral melody, as powerful as Chopin, silently communicating the breathtaking majesty of life itself.

You were born worthy of love and you remain worthy of love.

the place you wanted to escape to is the exact same place you escaped from. That the prison wasn't the place, but the perspective.

The weird thing about depression is that, even though you might have more suicidal thoughts, the fear of death remains the same.

the key to happiness – or that even more desired thing, calmness – lies not in always thinking happy thoughts. No. That is impossible. No mind on earth with any kind of intelligence could spend a lifetime enjoying only happy thoughts. The key is in accepting your thoughts, all of them, even the bad ones. Accept thoughts, but don't become them.

Magazines are very popular, despite no human ever feeling better for having read them. Indeed, their chief purpose is to generate a sense of inferiority in the reader that consequently leads to them needing to buy something, which they do, and then feel even worse, and so need to buy another magazine to see what they can buy next. It is an eternal and unhappy spiral that goes by the name of capitalism and it is really quite popular.

Every dead end and cul-de-sac helps us escape the maze. To know which path to take, it helps to take a few wrong ones.