Quotes from Matt Haig

She tried to make herself look as presentable as it was possible to look in the two seconds before the arrival of a man she simultaneously slept with every night and also hadn't ever slept with. Schrödinger's husband, so to speak.

The thing you need to realize is this: the game is never over until it is over. It isn't over if there is a single pawn still on the board.

Between life and death there is a library,' she said. 'And within that library, the shelves go on for ever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices . . . Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?

They live in your mind, the way they always lived inside

Life has a strange rhythm. It takes a while to fully be aware of this (...) but the rhythm is there. The tempo shifts and fluctuates; there are structures within structures, patterns within patterns.

The past resides inside the present, repeating hiccuping, reminding you of all the stuff that no longer is. It bleeds out from road signs and plaques on park benches and songs and surnames and faves and the covers of books.

Keep risking ridicule.

While knowledge without integrity is dangerous, integrity without knowledge is weak and useless.

artist   A human who notices the ridiculousness of being a human and paints, writes, builds, sculpts, films, acts, plays, sings, cries about it.

No infravalores nunca la gran importancia de las pequeñas cosas". -La Biblioteca de la Medianoche-

People didn't feel the enormity of the world or their own smallness within it. When I first travelled 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.

Because a pawn is never just a pawn. A pawn is a queen-in-waiting. All you need to do is find a way to keep moving forward. One square after another. And you can get to the other side and unlock all kinds of power.

When things are taken from us, the stuff that remains has more value. It rises not only in visibility but also intensity. What we lose in breadth we gain in depth.

The thing with mental turmoil is that so many things that make you feel better in the short term make you feel worse in the long term. You distract yourself, when what you really need is to know yourself.

The one thing depression has told you is that a day can be a long and intense stretch of time.

I wanted to psychologically disconnect myself. To be a self-sustaining market, psychologically speaking. To be comfortable with my own mistakes, knowing that every human is more than them. To allow myself to realize I know my inner workings better than a stranger does. To be able for other people to think I was a wanker, without me feeling I was one. To care about other people, but not about their misreadings of me within the opinion matrix of the internet.

The trouble is our lives are cluttered. The challenge is to find who we are amid the crowd of ourselves.

And yet the irony was that she soon placed herself in the margins voluntarily, giving up work for family, because she imagined that when she eventually arrived at her deathbed, she would feel more regret about unborn children than unwritten books.

we are encouraged to desire this state of affairs. 'Embrace' the future and 'let go' of the past. The whole of consumerism is based on us wanting the next thing rather than the present thing we already have. This is an almost perfect recipe for unhappiness.

we might have to stop thinking about what we will never be able to read and watch and say and do, and start to think of how to enjoy the world within our boundaries.

I have carefully calculated that the pain of me living as the bloody disaster that is myself is greater than the pain anyone else will feel if I were to die.

Travel makes one modest" said Gustave Flaubert. "You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world." Such a perspective can be liberating. Especially when you have an illness that may on one hand lower self-esteem but on the other intensifies the trivial.

A cat, I discovered, was very much like a dog. But smaller, and without the self-esteem issues.)

And I walked across the gravel, towards the road and somewhere in the universe of my soul a fiery, life-giving star collapsed, and a very black hole began to form.