Quotes from Matt Haig

It never rains forever. And know that, however wet you get, you are not the rain. You are not the bad feelings in your head. You are the person experiencing the storm. The storm may knock you off your feet. But you will stand again. Hold on.

And also, of course, there is the ultimate, all-important question: does it have a dog in it? (This book, by the way, does indeed have a dog in it, and this fact would very much excite a human but unfortunately does nothing for you.)

What sometimes feels like a trap is actually just a trick of the mind. 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. She wondered why she had never seen it before.

I liked the warmth of her body against mine and realized the pathos of being a human. Of being a mortal creature who was essentially alone but needed the myth of togetherness with others. Friends, children, lovers. It was an attractive myth. It was a myth you could easily inhabit.

She had a fire insider her. She wondered if the fire was to warm her or destroy her. The she realised. A fire has no motive. Only she could have that. The power was hers.

Some humans not only liked violence, but craved it, I realised. Not because they wanted pain, but because they already had pain and wanted to be distracted away from that kind of pain with a lesser kind.

A million people a year kill themselves. Between ten and twenty million people a year try to. Worldwide, men are over three times more likely to kill themselves than women.

Love was a way to live forever in a single moment, and it was also a way to see yourself as you had never actually seen yourself, and made you realise – having done so – that this view was a more meaningful one than any of your previous self-perceptions and selfdeceptions.

I'm French. I mean, that's my subject. Was also my nationality, too, though who lets nationality define them? Apart from idiots.

But the trouble with life was that it had to be lived consecutively.

And by noticing how modern life makes us feel, by allowing that reality and by being broad-minded enough to change when change is healthy, we can engage with this beautiful world without being worried it will steal who we are.

That was the whole point of home, the comfort of a perfectly effortless existence.

Of course, we can't visit every place or meet every person or do every job, yet most of what we'd feel in any life is still available. We don't have to play every game to know what winning feels like. We don't have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. We don't have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies.

Well, maybe we should try not to understand so much, and accept some more.

Silence is pain. But it is a pain with an exit route. When we can't speak, we can write. When we can't write, we can read. When we can't read, we can listen. Words are seeds. Language is a way back to life. And it is sometimes the most vital comfort we have.

It frightened me, how close violence is to the civilized surface of a human being. It wasn't the violence itself that was the worry, it was the amount of effort they'd gone to conceal it. A Homo sapiens was a primitive hunter who had woken each day with the knowledge he could kill.

meet with a success unexpected in common hours.' He'd also observed that part of this success was the product of being alone. 'I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

I didn't go too far before I saw her. She was walking on the other side of the street and she didn't see me. It was strange, the significance of that moment for me and the insignificance of it for her. But then I reminded myself that when galaxies collide, they pass right through.

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.

person was like a city. You couldn't let a few less desirable parts put you off the whole. There may be bits you don't like, a few dodgy side streets and suburbs, but the good stuff makes it worthwhile.

We are trapped by time, but also infinite. Made of flesh, but also stars.

Happy Christmas!' the man said. 'Yes', Charles Dickens said, who couldn't bring himself to say 'Happy Christmas' back. 'Isn't it the best of times?' the man went on. The cat gave a gentle miaow of disagreement in his arms as Charles Dickens nodded. 'Yes. And the worst.

I was scared. What if I didn't die? What if I was just paralyzed, and I was trapped, motionless, in that state, forever?

Thoreau wrote, 'It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.