Quotes from Matt Haig

She would see, for instance, her mother touch my hand and say, 'If there is such a thing as good marriage, it is because it resembles friendship rather than love.' Or, on questioning why she looked so sad, she would remark, 'My life has been full of terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened.' 'That's Montaigne, isn't it?

That is the biggest paradox, I think, about the modern world. We are all connected to each other but we often feel shut out. The increasing overload and complexity of modern life can be isolating.

It is easy to mourn the lives we aren't living.

It frightened me, how close violence is to the civilized surface of a human being. It wasn't the violence itself that was the worry, it was the amount of effort they'd gone to conceal it. A Homo sapiens was a primitive hunter who had woken each day with the knowledge he could kill. And now, the equivalent knowledge was only that he would wake up and buy something.

If beauty on Earth is the same as elsewhere: ideal in that it is tantalizing and unsolvable, creating a delicious kind of confusion.

Sentimentality is another human flaw. A distortion. Another twisted by-product of love, serving no rational purpose. And yet, there was a force behind it as authentic as any other.

This must be the hardest bit about being a spy, she thought. The emotion people store in you, like a bad investment. You feel like you are robbing people of something.

Kissing is what humans do when words have reached a place they can't escape from. It is a switch to another language. The kiss was an act of defiance, maybe of war. You can't touch us, is what the kiss said.

A sore throat doesn't become less sore simply because you've felt it before.

Time is not like pocket money that you can spend, because time is the person spending the pocket money and the pocket money is you

Sadness seemed to me like a disease, and I worried it was contagious.

What are you feeling?' 'Like I still want to die. I have wanted to die for quite a while. 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. In fact, I'm sure it would be a relief. I'm not useful to anyone.

Keep allowing yourself the human privilege of mistakes.

She had a fire inside her. She wondered if the fire was to warm her or destroy her. Then she realised. A fire had no motive. Only she could have that. The power was hers.

The thing you have to remember is that this is an opportunity and it is rare and we can undo any mistake we made, live any life we want. Any life. Dream big . . . You can be anything you want to be. Because in one life, you are.

A happy entanglement of warm limbs and warmer love. A physical and psychological merging that conjured a kind of inner light, a bio-emotional phosphorescence that was overwhelming in its gorgeousness.

You don't need the world to understand you. It's fine. Some people will never really understand things they haven't experienced. Some will. Be grateful.

Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. Now, you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend. Bruce Lee

Because prime numbers are fucking serious, man. Some serious shit. They can make you lose it. They're like sirens. They call you in with their isolated beauty and before you know it you are in some major mind-shit.

A friend doesn't care about the size of your house and that friend can be human, pixie or mouse. A friend may be a rabbit, a friend may be an elf. But a friend is a friend, if they like you for yourself.

We need to build a kind of immune system of the mind, where we can absorb but not get infected by the world around us.

Depression for me was total exposure. A red-raw, naked mind. A skinned personality. A brain in a jar full of the acid that is experience. I'm not talking about all that What doesn't kill you makes you stronger stuff. No. That's simply not true. What doesn't kill you very often makes you weaker. What doesn't kill you can leave you limping for the rest of your life.

Never let a stranger's negative opinion of you become your own negative opinion of you.

It seems that you have spent all your life saying things that you aren't really thinking. This is one of your barriers.' 'Barriers?' 'Yes. You have a lot of them. They stop you from seeing the truth.' 'About what?' 'About yourself. And you really need to start trying. To see the truth. Because this matters.