Quotes from Matt Haig

Forcing yourself to see the world through love's gaze can be healthy. Love is an attitude to life. It can save us.

Always, it is smaller than you, even when it feels vast. It operates within you, you do not operate within it. It may be a dark cloud passing across the sky, but - if that is the metaphor - you are the sky. You were there before it. And the cloud can't exist without the sky, but the sky can exist without the cloud.

It is time, my dear, to begin.' 'If you don't mind me asking – begin what?' 'Every life contains many millions of decisions. Some big, some small. But every time one decision is taken over another, the outcomes differ. An irreversible variation occurs, which in turn leads to further variations.

Maybe there are no easy paths. There are just paths

The Many Lives of Nora Seed

We use "depressed" as a synonym for "sad," which is fine, as we use "starving" as a synonym for "hungry," though the difference between depression and sadness is the difference between genuine starvation and feeling a bit peckish.

the thing that had left her vulnerable, really, was the absence of love.

She just needed potential. And she was nothing if not potential. She wondered why she had never seen it before. She heard Mrs Elm's voice, from under the table somewhere far behind her, cutting through the noise. 'Don't give up! Don't you dare give up, Nora Seed!' She didn't want to die. And she didn't want to live any other life than the one that was hers.

Maybe that is what growing up was all about. It was about changing your mind. Opening it right up. Admitting to yourself that you were wrong about stuff.

Time, I realise, is a weapon these days. Nothing weakens people like having to wait. In the street. With a knife in their hand.

Nothing makes you feel smaller, more trivial, than such a vast transformation inside your own mind while the world carries on, oblivious.

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three-parts dead" Maybe she was just scared of living

This was the species whose main excuse for not doing something was 'if only I had more time'. Perfectly valid until you realised they did have more time. Not eternity, granted, but they had tomorrow. And the day after tomorrow. And the day after the day after tomorrow. In fact I would have to write 'the day after' thirty thousand times before a final 'tomorrow' in order to illustrate the amount of time on a humans hands.

the simplest and quickest routes to happiness seems to be to make someone else happy.

Room Imagine forgiving yourself completely. The goals you didn't reach. The mistakes you made. Instead of locking those flaws inside to define and repeat yourself, imagine letting your past float through your present and away like air through a window, freshening a room. Imagine that.

You need to feel life's terror to feel its wonder.

Be proud to act like a normal human being. Keep daylight hours, get a regular job, and mix in the company of people with a fixed sense of right and wrong.

Minds can't see what they can't handle. It's like how humans never see the second hand of a clock mid-tick.

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.

That's why everyone hates each other nowadays,' he reckoned. 'Because they are overloaded with non-friends friends.

Even the bad experiences serve a purpose

Total fame was when you reached the point where looking like a hero, or genius, or god, required minimal effort. But the flipside was that it was precarious. It could be equally easy to fall and look like a devil or a villain, or just an arse.

It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn't make and the work we didn't do and the people we didn't marry and the children we didn't have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the kens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, as infinitum, until our time runs out.

Still staring blankly at The Book of Regrets, she wondered if her parents had ever been in love or if they had got married because marriage was something you did at the appropriate time with the nearest available person. A game where you grabbed the first person you could find when the music stopped.