Quotes from Matt Haig

From the outside a person sees your physical form, sees that you are a unified mass of atoms and cells. Yet inside you feel like a Big Bang has happened. You feel lost, disintegrated, spread across the universe amid infinite dark space.

Most people grow up gradually, over many years, but standing there in the still forest, Nikolas lost his childhood in a second. Nothing makes you grow up quicker than discovering your father is not the man you think he is.

I suppose, in the absence of universal certainties, we are our own best laboratory.

You are walking around with your head on fire and no one can see the flames.

Light was everything. Sunshine, windows with the blinds open. Pages with short chapters and lots of white space and Short. Paragraphs. Light was everything. But so, increasingly, were books. I read and read and read with an intensity I'd never really known before. I mean, I'd always considered myself to be a person who liked books. But there is a difference between liking books and needing them. I needed books.

The object of art is to give life a shape

The longer you live, the harder it becomes. To grab them. Each little moment as it arrives. To be living in something other than the past or the future. To be actually here.

Humans, in the day that has been the Earth, have been here for less than a minute. We're a late-night piss in the toilet, that's all we are.

Everyone has a limit - a point at which they can't take any more - and, almost out of nowhere, I had reached mine.

Catholicism, I discovered, was a type of Christianity for humans who like gold leaf, Latin and guilt.

You don't need to exhaust yourself trying to find your own value. You are not an iPhone needing an upgrade. Your value is not a condition of productivity or exercise or body shape or something you lose via inactivity. Value is not a plate that needs to be continually spun. The value is there. It is intrinsic, innate. It is in the "being" not the "doing.

She carried on talking. And as she did so, I realized there could be no cosmic consequence at all if I stopped listening, and with that realization I switched off the phone.

Philip K. Dick wrote that it is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.

To believe in the things we feel at that point is wrong, because those feelings would disappear with food or sleep.

Trouble doesn't always have to be caused. It's sometimes already there.

There is only the present. Just as every object on earth contains similar and interchanging atoms, so every fragment of time contains aspects of every other.

When really success isn't something you measure, and life isn't a race you can win. It's all . . . bollocks, actually . . .

Friend: Someone who will tell you the truth, often mistaken for an enemy.

When she thought about it – and increasingly she had been thinking about it – Nora was only able to think of herself in terms of the things she wasn't. The things she hadn't been able to become. And there really were quite a lot of things she hadn't become.

Camus also said, 'If something is going to happen to me, I want to be there'?

I think life always provides reasons to not die, if we listen hard enough.

Maybe there was no perfect life for her, but somewhere, surely, there was a life worth living. And if she was to find a life truly worth living, she realised she would have to cast a wider net.

It all makes sense. You came back here this time not because you wanted to die, but because you want to live. This library isn't falling down because it wants to kill you. It's falling down because it is giving you a chance to return.

We don't have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite.