Quotes from Matt Haig

Shops are to Earth-dwellers what equation booths are to Vonnadorians.

But she'll be there in the bathroom and she won't know how she got there.' 'And have you never walked into a room and wondered what you came in for? Have you never forgotten what you just did?

Distraction is an attempt to escape that rarely works. You don't put out a fire by ignoring the fire. You have to acknowledge the fire [...] In a world of a million distractions you are still left with only one mind.

I, for instance, discovered little moments of happiness, or humor, within despair. I realized things weren't always one thing or another thing. It was sometimes both. And as soon as we notice all that space inside us, we have a new perspective. Yes, there is room for a lot of pain but there is room for other things too.

Als we nu eens een manier konden vinden om de tijd stil te zetten (...) Daaraan moeten we werken. Voor het geval er een gelukkig moment voorbijzweeft. Om dat moment voor eeuwig te hebben, hoeven we alleen maar met ons netje te zwaaien en het als een vlinder te vangen.

She didn't need a vineyard or a Californian sunset to be happy. She didn't even need a large house and the perfect family. She just needed potential. And she was nothing if not potential. She wondered why she had never seen it before.

In becoming everyone, you are becoming no one. You are forgetting your root life.

Why didn't you?' 'Because, Nora, sometimes the only way to learn is to live.

It is in the "being" not the "doing.

I looked around at all the certificates on the wall and felt thankful to come from a place where personal success was meaningless.

We have the knowledge to realise we are just a mass of quanta and particles, like everything else is, and yet we keep trying to separate ourselves from the universe we live in

So, tou see? 'Because, Nora, sometimes the only way to learn is to live'.

There are patterns to life . . . Rhythms. It is so easy, while trapped in just the one life, to imagine that times of sadness or tragedy or failure or fear are a result of that particular existence. That it is a by-product of living a certain way, rather than simply living. I mean, it would have made things a lot easier if we understood there

The hardest dream of all to achieve is the dream of not being tormented by our unlived dreams. To cope with and accept unfulfillment as a natural human condition

And have you never walked into a room and wondered what you came in for? Have you never forgotten what you just did? Have you never blanked out or misremembered what you were just doing?

Kindness is a strong force.' 'And rare.' 'You might be looking in the wrong places.' 'Maybe.

Every second of every day we are entering a new universe.

there was no way of living that can immunise you against sadness. And that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness. You can't have one without the other.

That was the remarkable thing about humans—their ability to shape the path of other species, to change their fundamental nature.

To be complete in our incompleteness. To be free from the shackles of memory, and ambition, to be free from comparison to other people and other hypothetical selves, and to meet the moment without any other agenda, to exist as freely as time itself.

Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition. James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room

A quote I heard recently: "Facebook is where everyone lies to their friends. Twitter is where they tell the truth to strangers.

Think of all that possibility. It's exciting.' 'Yes. I suppose it is.' 'A whole life in front of you.' 'A whole life.' 'You could do anything, live anywhere. Somewhere a bit less cold and wet.

I am not sure I have ever met someone like you," I said. "That is good. What point would my life have, if there was a duplicate?