Quotes from Matt Haig

People say that humans are the superior species on this planet because we have minds that are conscious of their own existence, and therefore we have the capacity to create a culture, to create an art. I look at sheep, at peace on the moors, and wonder exactly how much of a delusion are our arrogant souls prepared to share?

But the truth is, it only half-works, you know? Places are places and memories are memories and life is fucking life.

A kiss,' she said, 'is like music. It stops time...

They'll be okay. They're looked after. The flowers have water.

We need to find out what is good for us, and leave the rest. We don't need another world. Everything we need is here, if we give up thinking we need everything.

Sad things happen in life. They just do. But so do happy things.

If we were happier with our bodies, we'd be kinder to them.

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

Nora had read about multiverses and knew a bit about Gestalt psychology. About how human brains take complex information about the world and simplify it, so that when a human looks at a tree it translates the intricately complex mass of leaves and branches into this thing called 'tree'. To be a human was to continually dumb the world down into an understandable story that keeps things simple.

4. There is absolutely nothing in the past that you can change. That's basic physics.

You'll be cool when you're dead.

I would sit on the beach, as waves crashed and retreated over the sparkling sand like lost dreams

Whenever I see someone reading a book, especially if it is someone I don't expect, I feel civilisation has become a little safer

Sometimes depression triggers anxiety.

You arrived, with baby feet and hands and infinite happiness, and then the happiness slowly evaporated as your feet and hands grew bigger.

I love her so much. I could not love her more. And the terror of not allowing myself to lover her has beaten that fear of losing her.

Don't worry about things you can't control. The news is full of things you can't do anything about. Do the things you can do stuff about—raise awareness of issues that concern you, give whatever you can to whichever cause you feel passionate about, and also accept the things you can't do.

After all, we aren't just who we are born. We are who we become. We are what life does to us. And she, born four hundred years ago, has had a lot of it, has done a lot of living.

Remember, looking at bad news doesn't mean good news isn't happening. It's happening everywhere. It's happening right now. Around the world. In hospitals, at weddings, in schools and offices and maternity wards, at airport arrival gates, in bedrooms, in inboxes, out in the street, in the kind smile of a stranger. A billion unseen wonders of everyday life.

We can think about anything. And so it makes sense that we end up sometimes thinking about everything. We might have to, sometimes, be brave enough to switch the screens off in order to switch ourselves back on. To disconnect in order to reconnect.

You must never wait in pain,' said the specialist, or words to that effect. It was a message I would think of years later when I was suicidal. 'You must see to it straight away. It doesn't go away by pretending it isn't there.

It is a strange paradox, that many of the clearest, most comforting life lessons are learned while we are at our lowest.

When I am in a room with People," he wrote, "if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes home to myself: but the identity of everyone in the room begins to press upon me so that I am in a very little time annihilated.

The more you research the science of depression, the more you realise it is still more characterised by what we don't know than what we do. It is 90 per cent mystery.