Quotes from Matt Haig

And how could I believe that Australian wine was automatically inferior to wine sourced from other regions on the planet when I had never drunk anything but liquid nitrogen?

If people pick on you, they see something inside you that they are scared of. Something special, which they might not have, which shines out of you like a jewel.

Don't spend your life worrying about what you are missing out on. Not to be Buddhist about it—okay, to be a little Buddhist about it—life isn't about being pleased with what you are doing, but about what you are being.

To be healthy meant to be covered. Clothed. Literally and metaphorically.

the way I understand my life is as a kind of Russian doll, with different versions inside other versions, each one enclosing the other, whereby the life before isn't seen from the outside but is still there.

Love is scary because it pulls you in with an intense force, a supermassive black hole which looks like nothing from the outside but from the inside challenges every reasonable thing you know. You lose yourself, like I lost myself, in the warmest of annihilations. It makes you do stupid things – things that defy all logic. The opting for anguish over calm, for mortality over eternity, and for Earth over home.

Without emotions humans wouldn't care for each other, and if they didn't care for each other, the species would have died out. To care for others is self-preservation. You care for someone and they care for you.

The longer you live, the more you realise that nothing is fixed. Everyone will become a refugee if they live long enough. Everyone would realise their nationality means little in the long run. Everyone would see their worldviews challenged and disproved. Everyone would realise that the thing that defines a human being is being a human being.

IT'S A WEIRD thing, depression. Even now, writing this with a good distance of fourteen years from my lowest point, I haven't fully escaped.

Mental wellbeing counts as much as physical wellbeing - indeed, it is part of physical wellbeing.

You simply can't fall in love and not think there is something bigger ruling us. Something, you know, not quite us. Something that lives inside us, caged in us, ready to help us or fuck us over. We are mysteries to ourselves. Even science knows that.

I am saying that the thing that looks the most ordinary might end up being the thing that leads you to victory.

Sometimes,' she said, as her eyes shone wide and bright, 'people look up to people not for who they have been, but for what they could become. For what they know they could be. They see in you something special.

But you will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life,' he said, wisely. 'You're quoting

May I be safe and live happily . . . May she be safe and live happily . . . May they be safe and live happily . . . May all living beings be safe and live happily.

So often, reading is seen as important because of its social value. It is tied to education and the economy and so on. But that misses the whole point of reading. Reading isn't important because it helps to get you a job. It's important because it gives you room to exist beyond the reality you're given. It is how humans merge; how minds connect. Dreams, empathy, understanding, escape.

her mother touch my hand and say, 'If there is such a thing as good marriage, it is because it resembles friendship rather than love.

Love was trapping me here.

If the modern world is making us feel bad, then it doesn't matter what else we have going for us, because feeling bad sucks.

Reading is love in action.

I do not like wearing clothes," I said, with quite delicate precision. "They chafe. They are uncomfortable around my genitals." And then, remembering all I had learned from Cosmopolitan magazine, I leaned in toward them and added what I thought would be the clincher. "They may seriously hinder my chances of achieving a tantric full-body orgasm.

There are things I have experienced I will never again be able to experience for the first time: love, a kiss, Tchaikovsky, a Tahitian sunset, jazz, a hot dog, a Bloody Mary. That is the nature of things. History was - is - a one-day street. You have to keep walking forwards. But you don't always need to look ahead. Sometimes you can just look around and be happy right where you are.

I began to wonder if it was a bad thing to dwell on problems. But then I remembered that it is precisely not talking about problems that is itself a problem. It's what causes people to break down in their office or classroom. It's what fills up addiction units and hospitals and raises suicide figures.

As she stared at Voltaire's still and peaceful expression – that total absence of pain – there was an inescapable feeling brewing in the darkness. Envy.