Quotes from Matt Haig

Pressure makes us, though. You start off as coal and the pressure makes you a diamond.' She didn't correct his knowledge of diamonds. She didn't tell him that while coal and diamonds are both carbon, coal is too impure to be able, under whatever pressure, to become a diamond. According to science, you start off as coal and you end up as coal. Maybe that was the real lesson.

You will regret the fear. In The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, Bronnie Ware—a nurse who worked in palliative care—shared her experience of talking to those near the end of their lives. Far and away the biggest regret they had was fear. Many of Bronnie's patients were in deep anguish that they had spent their whole lives worrying. Lives consumed by fear. Worrying what other people thought of them. A worry that had stopped them being true to themselves.

I wanted to be somewhere he had never been. I wanted somewhere where I didn't have to feel his ghost. But the truth is, it only half-works, you know? Places are places and memories are memories and life is fucking life.

Maybe even suicide would have been too active. Maybe in some lives you just float around and expect nothing else and don't even try to change. Maybe that was most lives.

The Last Update That Nora Had Posted Before She Found Herself Between Life and Death I miss my cat. I'm tired.

The quiet made her realize how much noise there was elsewhere in the world. Here, noise had meaning. You heard something and you had to pay attention.

This must be the hardest bit about being a spy, she thought. The emotion people store in you, like a bad investment.

We just have to close our eyes and savour the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays.

To want is to lack. That is what it means.

A world where, in the words of American sociologist Sherry Turkle, "we expect more from technology and less from each other.

What if there was never a way? What if I am . . . trapped?' 'So long as there are still books on the shelves, you are never trapped. Every book is a potential escape.' 'I just don't understand life,' sulked Nora. 'You don't have to understand life. You just have to live it.

There was more to her than a flat line of mild to moderate depression, spiced up with occasional flourishes of despair.

She realised, in that moment, that she was capable of a lot more than she had known.

She didn't correct his knowledge of diamonds. She didn't tell him that while coal and diamonds are both carbon, coal is too impure to be able, under whatever pressure, to become a diamond. According to science, you start off as coal and you end up as coal. Maybe that was the real-life lesson.

Walking one foot in front of the other, in the same direction, will always get you further than running around in circles. It's about the determination to keep walking forward.

The fun is in the jumping, mon amie.' 'But what if it's in the landing?

You had to stay consistent to life's delusions. All you had was your perspective, so objective truth was meaningless. You had to choose a dream and stick with it. Everything else was a con.And once you had tasted truth and love in the same potent cocktail there had to be no more tricks.

But amid pure nature (or the 'tonic of wildness' as Thoreau called it) solitude took on a different character. It became in itself a kind of connection. A connection between herself and the world. And between her and herself.

Each of us has the power to enter a new world. All we have to do is change our mind.

The challenge is to find who we are amid the crowd of ourselves.

Free will might be overrated. 'Anxiety,' Kierkegaard wrote, in the middle of the nineteenth century, 'is the dizziness of freedom.

We blow out a soap-bubble as long and as large as possible, although with the perfect certainty that it will burst." In this view, happiness is impossible, because of all these goals. Goals are the source of misery. An unattained goal causes pain, but actually achieving it brings only a brief satisfaction.

the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment'.

It's a sausage. A special sausage. A Dachshund sausage. A special little frankfurter. It's heaven in a bun. It's what all of civilisation has been heading towards...If I'd have known, growing up in Flanders, that one day I would get to taste a hot dog . Well!