Quotes from Matt Haig

Just as dogs were thwarted wolves, parks were thwarted forests. Humans loved both, possibly because humans were, well, thwarted.

The glacial landscape reminded her that she was, first and foremost, a human living on a planet. Almost everything she had done in her life, she realised - almost everything she has bought and worked for and consumed - had taken her away from understanding that she and all humans were really just one of nine million species.

School is a joke. But go along with it, because you are very near to the punchline.

To feel hope you don't need to be in a great situation. You just need to understand that things will change. Hope is available to all. You don't need to deny the reality of the present in order to have hope, you just need to know the future is uncertain, and that life contains light as well as dark.

in the cosmic order of things. There is no rejection, there is only redirection.

You see, his mother has thrown me out of the house because I was unfaithful to her. Or rather the faith I had wasn't the right kind. Given the absence of mind-reading technology, humans believe monogamy is possible.

Lincoln is not the only famous leader to have battled depression. Winston Churchill lived with the 'black dog' for much of his life too. Watching a fire, he once remarked to a young researcher he was employing: 'I know why logs spit. I know what it is to be consumed.

It's not you. It's them. (No, really. It is.)

Time disproves the lies depression tells.

On Earth you have to spend a lot of time traveling in between places, be it on roads or on rail tracks or in careers or relationships.

One thing that has remained constant, across four centuries, has been the desire for a British person to fill a silence with talk of the weather, and whenever I have lived there I was no exception to this rule.

And every era is clogged with Martins, and they are all dickheads.

And when a joke is powerful enough, you don't laugh, you scream. Yes, when the mask slips you scream out loud for all the terror in the world, and I screamed then.

You always have a choice. Life is full of choices

Because inside there is a golden you who loves you and wants you to win and prevail and be happy. #reasonstostayalive

The Dark Ages never ended.

I stared at the lute. At the darkness of the small holes amid the twisting decoration of the wood. I imagined, ridiculously, a world inside there. Deep in the shell of the lute. Where some miniature version of ourselves could live, safe and invisible and unharmed.

Nothing is stronger than a small hope that doesn't give up.

Always be aware of what you are doing, and why you are doing it.

You see, when you look at events in history there is a two-way perspective. Forwards and back. But at the time everything is one way.

Everything in human life was a test. That was why they all looked so stressed out.

Which means they are born, they make some friends, eat a few meals, they get married or they don't get married, have a child or two, or not, drink a few thousand glasses of wine, have sexual intercourse a few times, discover a lump somewhere, feel a bit of regret, wonder where all the time went, know they should have done it differently, realize they would have done it the same, and then they die.

As a species, we love to divide things up. We draw a straight line in a map between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans while the water remains oblivious.

The world exists in you. Your experience of the world isn't this objective unchangeable thing called "The World." No. Your experience of the world is your interaction with it, your interpretation of it. To a certain degree we all make our own worlds.