Quotes from Matt Haig

Regardez le ciel. Pensez au cosmos. Cherchez la grandeur à chaque occasion, afin de voir votre propre petitesse.

In California the only way to look like you are getting older is to look like you are getting younger...if you can move your forehead over the age of forty, then people become very suspicious.

You see, doing one thing differently is very often the same as doing everything differently. Actions can't be reversed within a lifetime, however much we try . . .

The more 'success' you get, the easier it is to be disappointed by not getting things. The only difference is that now no one feels sorry for you.

it is perfectly possible for anyone to feel old. All they need to do is become a teacher.

Don't do the work people expect you to do. Do the work you want to do. You only get one life. It's always best to live it as yourself.

Is there no way out of the mind?" Sylvia Plath

so we need quite quickly to learn how to be happy with not having society's unrealistic version of the 'best' body, and a bit happier with having our body

Add a comma to your day

I mean, it would have made things a lot easier if we understood there was no way of living that can immunise you against sadness. And that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness. You can't have one without the other. Of course, they come in different degrees and quantities. But there is no life where you can be in a state of sheer happiness for ever. And imagining there is just breeds more unhappiness in the life you're in.

I am just saying if you knew about me there would be a very strong chance you would think I was insane.

People with stamina aren't made any differently to anyone else,' she was saying. 'The only difference is they have a clear goal in mind, and a determination to get there. Stamina is essential to stay focused in a life filled with distraction. It is the ability to stick to a task when your body and mind are at their limit, the ability to keep your head down, swimming in your lane, without looking around, worrying who might overtake you . . .

And hope was often irrational. It made no sense. If it had made sense, it would have been called, well, sense. The other thing about hope was that it took effort, and I had never been used to effort.

Toronto is the greatest and happiest city on earth, but despite that — maybe because of that — it made me unhappy, as I just lived in an apartment there, never seeing anyone. Once I went to watch the Blue Jays play baseball, but being surrounded by so many people who I knew I could never connect with was the thing that made me want to [leave].

The one truth she had, a truth she was now proud of and pleased with, a truth she had not only come to terms with but welcomed openly, with every fiery molecule of her being. A truth that she scribbles hastily but firmly, pressing deep into the paper with the nib, in capital letters, in the first-person tense. A truth that was the beginning and seed of everything possible. A former curse and a present blessing. Three simple words containing the power and potential of a multiverse. I AM ALIVE.

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

Magazines are very popular, despite no human's ever feeling better for having read them. Indeed, their chief purpose is to generate a sense of inferiority in the reader that consequently leads to a feeling of needing to buy something, which the humans then do, and then feel even worse, and so need to buy another magazine to see what they can buy next. It is an eternal and unhappy spiral that goes by the name of capitalism, and it is really quite popular.

We don't have to do everything in order to be everything

Peanut butter sandwiches go perfectly well with a glass of white wine. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

If you keep on climbing a mountain, you will eventually reach the top. That's the thing with mountains, however big they are, there is always a top. Even if it takes all through the day and all through another night, you will usually get there. If yoy keep remembering there is a top.

Now, these were wounds I could have healed with a single thought. Just to feel pain, sometimes, was enough to cancel it.

The life of a human, according to the Scottish philosopher David Hume, was of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster.

It was making me think about human life in a way I didn't want to think about it. Human life, I realized, got progressively worse as you got older, by the sound of things.

A ver short chapter with a long title, in which not very much happens.