Quotes from Matt Haig

It was a familiar feeling. This feeling of being incomplete in just about every sense. An unfinished jigsaw of a human. Incomplete living and incomplete dying.

Stamina is essential to stay focused in a life filled with distraction. It is the ability to stick to a task when your body and mind are at their limit, the ability to keep your head down, swimming in your lane, without looking around, worrying who might overtake you . .

Indeed, war and money seemed to be so popular on the news, it should more accurately have been titled The War and Money Show.

Montaigne said that the point of life is to give yourself to yourself. I am trying.

If you aim to be something you are not, you will always fail. Aim to be you.

Feeling you have no time doesn't mean you have no time. Feeling you are ugly doesn't mean you are ugly. Feeling anxious doesn't mean you need to be anxious. Feeling you haven't achieved enough doesn't mean you haven't achieved enough. Feeling you lack things doesn't make you less complete.

But what happened in Heaven? What did you do there? After a while, didn't you crave flaws? Love and lust and misunderstandings, and maybe even a little violence to liven things up? Didn't light need shade? Didn't it?

You need to be uncomfortable. You need to hurt. As the Persian poet Rumi wrote in the twelfth century, "The wound is the place where the light enters you.

Can I ask you something?" asks Will, after a while. The man sips his whisky instead of answering. Will asks the question anyway. "Have you ever been in love?" The man places his glass down and stares at Will, steel-eyed. The expected reaction, "Once," he responds , the word just a croak from the back of his throat. Will nods. "It's always just once, isn't it? The rest..they're just echoes

Check your emotional armour is actually protecting you, and not so heavy you can't move.

Everything we need is here, if we give up thinking we need everything.

Anxiety,' Kierkegaard wrote, in the middle of the nineteenth century, 'is the dizziness of freedom.

The hardest bit about losing people you loved wasn`t thinking about the memories you had, the ones that had already been made. No. The hardest bit was the stuff that should have been, but had now been denied.

You have as many lives as you have possibilities. There are lives where you make different choices. And those choices lead to different outcomes. If you had done just one thing differently, you would have a different life story. And they all exist in the Midnight Library. They are all as real as this life.' 'Parallel lives?' 'Not always parallel. Some are more . . . perpendicular.

If we are being sold the idea of cool via a pair of trousers, we subconsciously feel a pressure to obtain and maintain that coolness. And all too often, when we have spent a lot of money on a desired item, we have a sinking feeling. 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.

Grief is terror, in its most undiluted form.

That was the price of human civilization—to create it, they had to close the door on their true selves. And so they are lost, that is how I understand it. And that is why they invented art: books, music, films, plays, painting, sculpture. They invented them as bridges back to themselves, back to who they are.

One thing mental illness taught me is that progress is a matter of acceptance. Only by accepting a situation can you change it. You have to learn not to be shocked by the shock. Not to be in a state of panic about the panic. To change what you can change and not get frustrated by what you can't.

She wasn't a black hole, she decided. She was a volcano. And like a volcano, she couldn't run away from herself. She'd have to stay there and tend to that wasteland. She could plant a forest inside herself.

Her mind felt loud, like a Sturm und Drang symphony, as if the ghost of a German composer was trapped inside her mind, conjuring chaos and intensity.

the main lesson of history is humans don't learn from history.

I feel the sheer unfathomable marvel that is this strange life we have, here on earth, the seven billion of us, clustered in our towns and cities on this pale blue dot of a planet, spending our allotted 30,000 days as best we can, in glorious insignificance.

wanting is also lacking. That is what "want" means.

One cliche attached to bookish people is that they are lonely, but for me books were my way out of being lonely.