Quotes from Matt Haig

Memories were just future sadness stored away

Feeling. That is what it is about. People place so much value on thought, but feeling is as essential.

Maybe it wasn't the lack of achievements that had made her and her brother's parents unhappy, maybe it was the expectation to achieve in the first place. She had no idea about any of it, really. But on that boat she realised something. She had loved her parents more than she ever knew, and right then, she forgave them completely.

Cities twinkling at night as you drive past them, as if they are fallen constellations of stars.

When you watch the news and see members of your species in turmoil, do not think there is nothing you can do. But know it is not done by watching news.

What is depression? Its like a tornado, theres nothing you can do but sit and wait, and finally when the storm is over ... you are left with the destruction. The scars on your body, the puffy eyes from crying, the exhaustion from fighting a losing battle. It's consuming.

We're all lonely for something we don't know we're lonely for. —DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

The world is real, but your world is subjective. Changing your perspective changes your planet.

There are more possible ways to play a game of chess than the amount of atoms in the observable universe. So it gets very messy. And there is no right way to play; there are many ways. In chess, as in life, possibility is the basis of everything. Every hope, every dream, every regret, every moment of living.

You are not the most intelligent creature in the universe. You are not even the most intelligent creature on your planet. The tonal language in the song of a humpback whale displays more complexity than the entire works of Shakespeare. It is not a competition. Well, it is. But don't worry about it.

She knew that everything humans see is a simplification. A human sees the world in three dimensions. That is simplification. Humans are fundamentally limited, generalising creatures, living on auto-pilot, who straighten curved streets in their minds, which explains why they get lost all the time.

Walt Whitman was right about at least one thing. You will contradict yourself. You are large. You contain multitudes.

Your brain is open. Never let it be closed.

No two moralities match. Accept different shapes, so long as they aren't sharp enough to hurt.

I want to read books that make me laugh and cry and fear and hope and punch the air in triumph. I want a book to hug me or grab me by the scruff of my neck. I don't even mind if it punches me in the gut. Because we are here to feel.

Like I was falling even while I was standing still. Aching limbs.

The doctor says it's situational depression. It's just that I keep on having new … situations.

It's a wonder they ever get out of bed at all. But they do, repeatedly, thousands of times each. And not only that - they do it themselves, with no technology to help them. Maybe a little electrical activity in their toothbrushes and hairdryers, but nothing more than that. And all to reduce body odour, and hairs, and halitosis, and shame.

But it is helpful to remember that our perspective is our world. And our external circumstances don't need to change in order for our perspective to change. And the forests we find ourselves in are metaphorical, and sometimes we are unable to escape them, but with a change of perspective we can live among the trees.

It was one of life's rules – Never trust someone who is willingly rude to low-paid service staff –

In one life she only ate toast.

nothing is perfect and everything is perfect.

Every time I read a great book I felt I was reading a kind of map, a treasure map, and the treasure I was being directed to was in actual fact myself. But each map was incomplete, and I would only locate the treasure if I read all the books, and so the process of finding my best self was an endless quest. And books themselves seemed to me to reflect this idea. Which is why the plot of every book ever can be boiled down to 'someone is looking for something'.

I should also say, in case it needs saying: I don't know for sure that the words I write were the words that were actually spoken. They probably weren't. But this is how I remember these things, and all we can ever be is faithful to our memories of reality, rather than the reality itself, which is something closely related but never precisely the same thing.