Quotes from Matt Haig

Don't attach yourself to people, and try to feel as little as you possibly can for those you do meet. Because otherwise you will slowly lose your mind

There is only one way to set up a board. There are nine million variations after the first six moves. And after eight moves there are two hundred and eighty-eight billion different positions. And those possibilities keep growing. There are more possible ways to play a game of chess than the amount of atoms in the observable universe.

pawn is the most magical piece of all. It might look small and ordinary but it isn't. Because a pawn is never just a pawn. A pawn is a queen-in-waiting. All you need to do is find a way to keep moving forward. One square after another. And you can get to the other side and unlock all kinds of power.

She had loved no one, and no one had loved her back. She had been empty, her life had been empty, walking around, faking some kind of human normality like a sentient mannequin of despair. Just the bare bones of getting through.

The time ahead of you is like the land beyond the ice. You can guess what it could be like but you can never know. All you know is the moment you are in.

If you aim to be something you are not, you will always fail. Aim to be you. Aim to look and act and think like you. Aim to be the truest version of you. Embrace that you-ness. Endorse it. Love it. Work hard at it. And don't give a second thought when people mock it or ridicule it.

I've let people down. I haven't always been easy. I've done things I regret. I was a bad wife. Not always a good mother, either. People have given up a little on me, and I don't entirely blame them.

It is so nice to be somewhere I don't know. To be somewhere new, when the world has felt so stale and familiar.

Never understimate the big importance of small things.

Reading Schopenhauer when you felt melancholy was like taking off your clothes when you felt cold, but a line of his came back to me.

That, she supposed, was the basis of depression as well as the difference between fear and despair. Fear was when you wandered into a cellar and worried that the door would close shut. Despair was when the door closed and locked behind you.

What a gift it was to be normal! We're all walking on these unseen tightropes when really we could slip at any second and come face to face with all the existential horrors that only lie dormant in our minds.

Never trust someone who is willingly rude to low-paid service staff

I think intellectualism can be a barrier to reading. The point of a book - song, film, whatever - is to FEEL it. That's why we're here, no?

it isn't healthy to walk around no longer familiar streets, looking for memories that have been paved over

It seems that worrying about growing old is a sign you are young.

Depression lies. And while the feelings themselves were real, the things they led me to believe were resolutely not.

Oh, and let's not forget the Things They Do to Make Themselves Happy That Actually Make Them Miserable. This is an infinite list. It includes shopping, watching TV, taking the better job, getting the bigger house, writing a semiautobiographical novel, educating their young, making their skin look mildly less old, and harboring a vague desire to believe there might be a meaning to it all.

The text began to swirl and soon became indecipherable, in fast motion, as she felt herself weaken. She never knowingly let go of the #book, but there was a moment where she was no longer a person #reading it, and a consequent moment where there was no book--or library--at all.

In those moments that burst alive the present lasts for ever, and I know there are many more presents to live. I understand. I understand you can be free. I understand that the way you stop time is by stopping being ruled by it.

Under the Greenwood Tree Who loves to lie with me, And turn his merry note Unto the sweet bird's throat, Come hither, come hither, come hither: Here shall he see no enemy But winter and rough weather.

It felt civilised and modern. It felt refined and tantalising, all at once, like a polite collective pre-orgasm.

And thus the heart will break, yet brokenly live on. —Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

Love is what the humans are all about but they don't understand it. If they understood it, then it would disappear.