Quotes from Matt Haig

Even before I had fully discovered the concepts of astrology, homeopathy, organised religion and probiotic yoghurts I was able to work out that what humans may have lacked in physical attractiveness, they made up for in gullibility.

otherwise happiness will drip through us like water through a leaky bucket. The moment we want is the moment we are dissatisfied. The more we want, the more we will drip ourselves away.

Movement isn't progress if we are heading in the wrong direction

The purpose of science is to find out where the limits of possibility end. When we have achieved that – and we shall – there will be no more magic, no more superstition, there will just be what is.

That is what history is, the teaching and telling of it. It is a way to control it and order it. To turn it into a pet. But history you have lived is different to history you read in a book or on a screen. And some things in the past can't be tamed.

And I knew there was one rule that held fast across the universe: if you wanted to get someone on your side, what you really had to do was relieve their pain.

Tears were a kind of language and I felt all language was far away from me. I was beneath tears. Tears were what you shed in purgatory. By the time you were in hell it was too late.

There is a darkness that fringes everything. It is a most horrid ecstasy.' And I felt the horror of her horror. That, I suppose, is a price we pay for love: the absorbing of another's pain as if our own.

The art of swimming...was about purity. The more focused you were on the activity, the less focused you were on everything else. You kind of stopped being you and became the thing you were doing.

Mornings were hard on Earth. You woke up tireder than when you went to sleep. Your back ached. Your neck ached. Your chest felt tight with anxiety that came from being mortal. And then, on top of all that, you had to do so much before the day even started. The main problem was the stuff to do in order to be presentable.

For me, personally, the point of writing is to connect me to this world, to my fellow humans. We are all miles apart. We have no real means of connecting except via language. And the deepest form of language is storytelling.

It may be a dark cloud passing across the sky, but – if that is the metaphor – you are the sky.

Sometimes change is for the better, and sometimes change isn't for the better.

I realise I would like to solve the mystery of her just as much as she wants to solve the mystery of me and she nestles a little into me and I put my arm around her. Right there. On the park bench. Maybe that is what it takes to love someone. Finding a happy mystery you would like to unravel for ever.

Every move had been a mistake, every decision a disaster, every day a retreat from who she'd imagined she'd be.

You are lucky to be alive. Inhale and take in life's wonders. Never take so much as a single petal of a single flower for granted.

For centuries I have thought all my despair is grief. But people get over grief. They get over even the most serious grief in a matter of years. If not get over then at least live beside. And the way they do this is by investing in other people, through friendship, through family, through teaching, through love.

He smiled softly. "People you love never die." I had no idea of the sense of his words, but they stayed with me for centuries.

The lesson of history is that ignorance and superstition are things that can rise up, inside almost anyone, at any moment. And what starts as a doubt in a mind can swiftly become an act in the world.

Your life will have 25,000 days in it. Make sure you remember some of them.

I am happy here. Why want another universe if this one has dogs?

There wasn't a change in the world order that didn't echo other changes in the world order. And the news stopped being new. The very word 'news' became a joke. It was all just a cycle. A slowly rotating downward one. And your tolerance for human beings, making the same mistakes over and over and over and over again, began to fade. It was like being stuck in the same song, with a chorus you had once liked but now made you want to rip your ears off.

There are billions of different versions of an older you. There is one version of the present you.

Ignore idiots with narrow definitions od beauty. They are blind to life's imperfect wonder.