Quotes from Matt Haig

A deep, dreamless nothing, and now – thanks to the ring of a phone alarm – she was awake and didn't know where she was.

Pain, of any kind, is a very isolating experience.

advised I take things "one day at a time," as if there were another way for days to be experienced.

There were surely lives where she was sitting beside a swimming pool in the sunshine right now. Lives where she was playing music, or lying in a warm lavender-scented bath, or having incredible third-date sex, or reading on a beach in Mexico, or eating in a Michelin-starred restaurant, or strolling the streets of Paris, or getting lost in Rome, or tranquilly gazing at a temple near Kyoto, or feeling the warm cocoon of a happy relationship.

Fiction felt not like an escape from truth, but a release into it.

Betrand Russell wrote that "To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three-parts dead".

But it is important to remember the bottom of the valley never has the clearest view. And that sometimes all you need to do in order to rise up again is to keep moving forward.

How happy is the little stone That rambles in the road alone, And doesn't care about careers, And exigencies never fears; Whose coat of elemental brown A passing universe put on; And independent as the sun, Associates or glows alone, Fulfilling absolute decree In casual simplicity.

Well, you don't see yourself as a bad cat owner any more. You looked after him as well as he could have been looked after.

When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us. Helen Keller, We Bereaved

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.

Liebe war der Weg, ewig zu leben in einem einzigen Moment

The lonely mind in the busy city yearns for connection because it thinks human-to-human connection is the point of everything.

For me, reading was never an antisocial activity. It was deeply social. It was the most profound kind of socializing there was. A deep connection to the imagination of another human being. A way to connect without the many filters society normally demands.

That's what starts to happen, 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.

Pas op voor de kloof. De kloof tussen waar je bent en waar je wilt zijn. Alleen al door eraan te denken verwijd je de kloof. En ten slotte val je erin.

My mum died on different dates in different lives. I'd like a life where she is still here. Does that life exist?' Mrs Elm's attention switched to Nora. 'Maybe it does.' 'Great.' 'But you can't get there.' 'Why not?' 'Because this library is about your decisions. There was no choice you could have made that led to her being alive beyond yesterday. I'm sorry.

You are not the only one with sorrows in this world. Don't hoard them like they are precious. There is always plenty of them to go around.

This was the life she had been in mourning for. This was the life she had beaten herself up for not living. This was the timeline she thought she had regretted not existing in.

How to be happy Do not compare yourself to other people. Do not compare yourself to other people. Do not compare yourself to other people. Do not compare yourself to other people. Do not compare yourself to other people. Do not compare yourself to other people. Do not compare yourself to other people.

you see? Sometimes regrets aren't based on fact at all. Sometimes regrets are just . . .' She searched for the appropriate term and found it. 'A load of bullshit.

Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived.

A policeman grips an arm to take you somewhere, but why does a wife stroke your hand? What was the purpose? It wasn't the touch Cosmopolitan had talked about, and it certainly didn't boost my mood.

be part of nature was to be part of the will to live.