Quotes from Matt Haig

An image of a black hole - she realised that's what she was. A black hole. A dying star, collapsing in on itself.

Open your mind, this is only a song, But the way to be happy is to admit you were wrong.

That's the odd thing about depression and anxiety. It acts like an intense fear of happiness, even as you yourself consciously want that happiness more than anything.

Are you someone who watches life, or someone who participates?

Aim to have less stuff to do.

She realized that you could be as honest as possible in life, but people only see the truth if it is close enough to their reality.

I stared at the tweet I was about to post. It wasn't going to add anything to my life. Or anyone else's life. It was just going to lead to more checking of my phone, like Pepys with his pocket watch. I pressed delete, and felt a strange relief as I watch each letter disappear.

Yet people still don't think depression really that bad. If they did, they wouldn't say the things they say.

The way out is never through yourself.

Energy rightly applied and directed will accomplish anything.

After reading the news, I go on Twitter. I don't have an account but I find it interesting - all the different voices, the squabbles, the arrogance of certainty, the ignorance, the occasional, but wonderful, compassion, and watching the evolution of language head towards a new kind of hieroglyphics.

And nor is mental health something we can clear up once and for all, but rather something we always have to attend to, like a garden that needs nurturing, for as long as we live.

We were made from stardust, like everything in the universe, and we - each of us - carried a power inside us. A power that couldn't be destroyed anymore than the universe could be destroyed.

Many of us have every material thing we need, so the job of marketing is now to tie the economy to our emotions, to make us feel like we need more by making us want things we never needed before. We are made to feel poor on thirty thousand pounds a year. To feel poorly travelled if we have been to only ten other countries. To feel old if we have a wrinkle. To feel ugly if we aren't photoshopped and filtered.

And hope was often irrational. It made no sense. ... The other thing about hope was that it took effort...

It can drive you insane, thinking of all the other lives we don't live.

Dads are just men who have babies but I know he loved me because I felt it go out of me when he crashed. It was like air or blood or bones or something that made me me and it wasnt there any more and I had only half of it now and I didn't know if that was enough.

But, as C.S. Lewis once put it, 'The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say "My tooth is aching" than to say "My heart is broken".

Or maybe, just maybe, he'd got close enough to sense the melancholy that sits at the core of her, usually hidden deep behind a superficial mask of cheerful sarcasm.

Life is the people who love you. No one will ever choose to stay alive for an iPhone. It's the people we reach via the iPhone that mater.

People are craving not just physical space but the space to be mentally free. A space from unwanted distracted thoughts that clutter our heads like pop-up advertising of the mind in an already frantic world. And that space is still there to be found. It's just that we can't rely on it. We have to consciously seek it out.

Einstein said the way to understand relativity was to imagine the difference between love and pain. "When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour.

Well, that's the beauty, isn't it? You just never know how it ends.

A SIDE EFFECT OF depression is sometimes to become obsessed with the functioning of your brain.