Quotes from Matt Haig

Breathe. Breathe deep and pure and smooth. Concentrate on it. Breathing is the pace you set your life at. It's the rhythm of the song of you. It's how to get back to the center of things. The center of yourself. When the world wants to take you in every other direction. It was the first thing you learned to do. The most essential and simple thing you do. To be aware of breath is to remember you are alive.

You are not other people. You are you. You have no control over other people. You have no absolute control over what they think of the world or of politics or of you. You have no control over what harm they may have done. Even if the harm they have done is to you.

the whole planet is having a kind of collective breakdown, then unhealthy behaviour fits right in. 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.

At its worst you find yourself wishing, desperately, for any other affliction, any physical pain, because the mind is infinite, and its torments – when they happen – can be equally infinite.

We all come from randomness. We exist out of uncertainty. Out of near impossibility. And yet we exist.

Saya sudah mengulur-ulur waktu menjadi dewasa, dan pikiran tentang kehidupan saya selanjutnya sebagai orang dewasa menaungi saya bagai gumpalan awan gelap yang sekarang mulai pecah dan menurunkan hujan

Even the other people on the beach don't care about your body. They don't. They are staring at the sea, or they are obsessed with their own appearance. And if they are thinking about you, why do you care? Why do you humans worry so much about a stranger's opinion? Why don't you do what I do? Let it wash all over you. Allow yourself just to be as you are. Just be. Just beach.

It is another unsolved mystery in a world full of unsolved mysteries.Now stand up and walk out the way you came, and the moment that fresh air caresses your face, you will realize that that is what makes the world so beautiful. All those unsolved mysteries. And you won't ever want to interfere with that beauty again.

How to be happy (2) Don't compare your actual self to a hypothetical self. Don't drown in a sea of "what if"s. Don't clutter your mind by imagining other versions of you, in parallel universes, where you made different decisions.

The kind that could only be possible in someone who was going to die at some point in the future, and also someone who had lived enough to know that loving and being loved back was a hard thing to get right, but when you managed it, you could see forever.

By the time they [humans] had read enough books to actually reach a state of knowledge where they can do anything with it they are dead

What was it about those silent exchanges in a crowded place? There was a magic to them, like a secret shared.

You are you. The past is the past. The only way to make a better life is from inside the present. To focus on regret does nothing but turn that very present into another thing you will wish you did differently. Accept your own reality. Be human enough to make mistakes. Be human enough not to dread the future. Be human enough to be, well, enough. Accepting where you are in life makes it so much easier to be happy for other people without feeling terrible about yourself.

And they seem so damn happy to have made it and you don't resent them, but you do resent yourself for not having their ability to work it all out. Do you? Or is this maze just for me?

It's okay to wear the scars of experience.

AS DR DAVID Adam says in his brilliant account of obsessive compulsive disorder, The Man Who Couldn't Stop: 'Only a fool or a liar will tell you how the brain works.' A brain is not a toaster. It is complex.

Her social media activity wasn't great in this life, which was always a promising sign.

Crying releases stress hormones. Swearing increases pain tolerance. Fury can motivate us into action. Feel what you feel.

Andrea told me after that film that there was too much Matt Haig in Matt Haig. She was kind of joking but kind of on to something. So for me, anything that lessens that extreme sense of selfe, that makes me feel me but at a lower volume, is very welcome. (...) Travel has been one of those things.

when you write with a pen it is like writing with a part of yourself like it is another finger.

When she thought about it – and increasingly she had been thinking about it – Nora was only able to think of herself in terms of the things she wasn't. The things she hadn't been able to become.

Music is about time,' I told her. 'It is about controlling time.' When she stopped playing, she looked thoughtful for a moment and said something like, 'I sometimes want to stop time. I sometimes want, in a happy moment, for a church bell never to ring again. I want not to ever have to go to the marker again. I want for the starlings to stop flying in the sky... But we are all at the mercy of time. We are all the strings, aren't we?

When there is nothing we can do about something, the point of worry begins to diminish. "Everybody dies," wrote Nora Ephron." There's nothing you can do about it. Whether or not you eat six almonds a day.

Humans are ruled by their basic desires and this leads to suffering and pain, because our desires make us crave things from the world but the world is nothing but representation.