Quotes from Matt Haig

She imagined, now, what it would be like to accept herself completely. Every mistake she had ever made. Every mark on her body. Every dream she hadn't reached or pain she had felt. Every lust or longing she had suppressed.

Willie Nelson once said that sometimes, you have to either write a song or you kick your foot through a window. The third option , I suppose , is that you write a book.

A handful of people, working at a handful of technology companies, through their choices will steer what a billion people are thinking today . . . I don't know a more urgent problem than this . . . It's changing our democracy, and it's changing our ability to have the conversations and relationships that we want with each other.' —Tristan Harris, former Google employee

I want to know if one of the reasons I sometimes feel like I am on the brink of a breakdown is partly because the world sometimes seems on the brink of a breakdown.

Actually, depression can be exacerbated by things being all right externally, because the gulf between what you are feeling and what you are expected to feel becomes larger.

As she stared now at the magazine cover - an image of a black hole - she realised that's what she was. A black hole. A dying start collapsing in on itself.

She was the stars and the heavens and the oceans. There was nothing but that single fragment of time, and this bud of love we had planted inside it. And then, at some point after it started, the kiss ended, and I stroked her hair, and the church bells rang in the distance and everything in the world was in alignment.

It was depressing that he found it so much easier to question his sanity than my reality.

You couldn't be a little bit human in the same way you couldn't be a little bit in love. It was all or nothing. A drop was an ocean. And maybe being human wasn't even down to DNA in the end. Maybe it was about the ability to love, when you knew love was irrational. Yeah, maybe being human was to make no sense.

It's hard to predict, isn't? The things that will make us happy

What sometimes feels like a trap is actually just a trick of the mind.

Pressure makes us, though. You start off as coal and the pressure makes you a diamond.

The moment we try and turn a thought into words we place it into a shared world. This shared world we call 'language', Once we take our personal unseen experiences and make them seen, we help others, and even ourselves, to understand what we are going through. What we say aloud can never quite capture what we feel inside, but that is almost the point. Words don't capture, they release.

Be kind to yourself.

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. It is not where we are, but where we want to go, and all that. "Is there no way out of the mind?" Sylvia Plath famously asked.

Bertrand Russell wrote that 'To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three-parts dead'.

If you're feeling mentally unwell, treat yourself as you would a physical problem

Familiarity could make you a stranger to yourself.

That kind of monotony that running generates - the one soundtracked by heavy breathing and the steady rhythm of feet on pavements - became a kind of metaphor for depression.

Why depression is hard to understand IT IS INVISIBLE. It is not "feeling a bit sad.

Don't think your work matters more than it does.

Don't be proud of only liking realism. It is like being proud of not having an imagination.

People joke, in our field, about Pythagoras and his religious cult based on perfect geometry and other abstract mathematical forms, but if we are going to have religion at all then a religion of mathematics seems ideal, because if God exists then what is He but a mathematician?

Therefore, mathematically...there was no chance at all that [she] could have existed. A zero in ten-to-the-power-of-forever chance. And yet there she was, in front of me, and I was quite taken aback by it all; I really was. Suddenly it made me realise why religion was such a big thing around here. Because, yes, sure, God could not exist. But then neither could humans. So, if they believed in themselves - the logic must go - why not believe in something that was only a fraction more unlikely?