Quotes from Matt Haig

the thing that was depressing me was that humans weren't turtles. Turtles have been around for two hundred and twenty million years. Since the Triassic period. And they haven't really changed that much. Humans, in contrast, have been around only a short while. And you don't have to be a genius to switch on the news and conclude: we probably don't have long. The

The silence at the end of the song is as important as the song itself.

To be calm becomes a kind of revolutionary act. To be happy with your own nonupgraded existence.

But where there were books, there was always the temptation to open them.

This is what happens when you live on Earth. You crack. You hold reality in your hands until it burns and then you have to drop the plate.

It is strange how close the past is, even when you imagine it to be so far away. Strange how it can just jump out of a sentence and hit you.

And Nora felt similarly, in that moment. Although she had only been left alone for an hour at this point, she had never experienced this level of solitude before, amid such unpopulated nature.

He just stared at me, his eyes shining blank circles, and seemed to know exactly who it was, standing behind the juniper bushes. But he stayed quiet. He was a good dog. And I loved him.

I was able to work out that what humans may have lacked in physical attractiveness, they made up for in gullibility. You could tell them anything in a convincing-enough voice and they would believe it. Anything, of course, except the truth.

If there is a way out, a way that isn't death itself, then the exit route is through words. But rather than leave the mind entirely, words help us leave a mind, and give us the building blocks to build another one, similar but better, nearby to the old one but with firmer foundations, and very often a better view.

You cannot know the future. You look at the news and it looks terrifying. But you can never be sure. That is the whole thing with the future. You don't know. At some point you have to accept that you don't know. You have to stop flicking ahead and just concentrate on the page you are on.

Everything passes—joy follows pain, warmth melts the ice

The meaning of life. There is none. People search for external values and meaning in a world which not only can't provide it but is also indifferent to their quest.

Back in Mother Ivy's time I would have been obliged to cook you gingerbread and show you my spickle dancing, and yet now I have permission to chop you up into little pieces. I cry myself to sleep every night, and feel dead inside, but society is definitely improving.

It was hard not to compare Mrs Elm to her mother, who treated Nora like a mistake in need of correction.

No single feeling becomes the only feeling if you let it all happen. And the way to let it all happen is to see the value in it all, in everything. To see the way the dark might lead to the light and the way present pain might lead to future hope.

The very reason such music exists is because it is a language that couldn't be communicated in any other way. But all I can say is that I felt suddenly

When normality becomes madness, the only way to find sanity is by daring to be different. Or daring to be the you that exists beyond all the physical clutter and mind debris of modern existence.

Every day, not only did he wear his red and white outfit, complete with shiny black belt and boots, but he was determined to be as jolly as could be, because the easiest way to make other people happy was to be happy yourself, or at least to act as if you were. That was how his mother had done it. And even his father too, once upon a time.

Nothing makes you feel smaller, more trivial, than such a vast transformation inside your own mind while the world carries on, oblivious. Yet nothing is more freeing. To accept your smallness in the world.

in her delirium, she had thought of the word 'equidistant'. A word that belonged in the clinical safety of a classroom. Equidistant. Such a neutral, mathematical kind of word, and one that became a stuck thought, repeating itself like a manic meditation as she used the last of her strength to stay almost exactly where she was. Equidistant. Equidistant. Equidistant. Not aligned to one bank or the other. That was how she had felt most of her life.

But once you sense that vastness, once something reveals it, hope emerges, whether you want it to or not, and it clings to you as stubbornly as lichen clings to rock.

She leaned towards me and kissed me on the lips. It was just a peck, but a peck on the lips was not just a peck. 'What was that for?' I asked. I could just about see her smile in the moonlight. It wasn't a flirtatious smile. It was a plain, matter-of-fact one. 'For you to have something else to occupy your mind.

What we say aloud can never quite capture what we feel inside, but that is almost the point. Words don't capture, they release.