Quotes from Matt Haig

Surely anyone who has ever had a smartphone or a Twitter account can relate to such compulsive behavior. Check, check, check, and once more, just to see. When the ability to check something turns into the compulsion to do so, we often find ourselves craving the time before, when there was no ability to check in the first place.

Fish get depressed when they have a lack of stimulation. A lack of everything. When they are just there, floating in a tank that resembles nothing at all.

When I first traveled around the globe, it took over a year, on a boat full of men, who were lucky if they made it. Now, the world is just there. All of it. In an hour I will be on a flight to Sydney, and by lunchtime I will have arrived. It makes me feel claustrophobic, as if the world is literally shrinking, like a balloon losing air.

Maybe that's what all lives were, though. Maybe even the most seemingly perfectly intense or worthwhile lives ultimately felt the same. Acres of disappointment and monotony and hurts and rivalries but with flashes of wonder and beauty. Maybe that was the only meaning that mattered. To be the world, witnessing itself. 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. She

As a child I used to worry about death a lot. Certainly more than a child should.

And the trouble is that now we have 24-hour news coverage, where events are continuously breaking but rarely absorbed. We are in a world of news, which by its very nature skims the new moment, garnished with headlines and sound bites, rarely giving us a calmer, more

It's okay to let people find you. You don't have to spread yourself so thin you become invisible. You don't have to always be the person reaching out. You can sometimes allow yourself to be reached. As the great writer Anne Lamott puts it: "Lighthouses don't go running all over an island for boats to save; they just stand there shining.

Kurt Vonnegut was right. "Reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found.

Regrets ignore chronology. They float around. The sequence of these lists changes all the time.

Los momentos felices pueden provocar dolor si se les da tiempo.

Midnight Library is not one of ghosts. It is not a library of corpses. It is a library of possibility. And death is the opposite of possibility.

We don't have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies. ... We are as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum.

To experience beauty on Earth, you needed to experience pain and to know mortality. That is why so much that is beautiful on this planet has to do with time passing and the Earth turning.

In every life there is a moment, A crisis. One that says, what I believe is wrong. It happens to everyone, the only difference being how that knowledge changes them.

This was a life where she put four exclamation marks in a row. That was probably what happier, less uptight people did.

But what I didn't realise was that when it came to that sneaking, camouflaged, untouchable giant known as the Future, I was as vulnerable as anyone.

We're all total bastards, us humans, but also totally wonderful.

when you know it is possible for you to feel pain you have no control over. You become vulnerable. Because the possibility of pain is where love stems from.

Learn to say to no things that get in the way of life. And to say yes to the things that help you live.

Unchecked distractions will lead you to distraction.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you," wrote Angelou. Silence is pain. But it is a pain with an exit route. When we can't speak, we can write. When we can't write, we can read. When we can't read, we can listen. Words are seeds. Language is a way back to life. And it is sometimes the most vital comfort we have.

The most painful moments in life expand us. And when the pain leaves, space remains. Space we can fill with life itself.

The sky doesn't start above us. There is no starting point for sky. We live in the sky.

But stories aren't always lies. They are things stored in all our imaginations-hence the name stories-and it is the author's job to point them out.