Quotes from Matt Haig

She remembered something Mrs Elm had told her in the Midnight Library. 'You see, doing one thing differently is very often the same as doing everything differently. Actions can't be reversed within a lifetime, however much we try .

Because of some strange predictive homesickness that festered alongside a depression that told her, ultimately, she didn't deserve to be happy.

A human is a real bipedal lifeform of mid-range intelligence, living a largely deluded existence on a small water-logged planet in a very lonely corner of the universe.

Music simply uncovers what is there, makes you feel emotions that you didn't necessarily know you had inside you, and runs around waking them all up. A rebirth of sorts.

Mum said Oh God oh please God oh God oh please please oh God and God said nothing.

As Tolstoy wrote, back in 1894, in The Kingdom of God Is Within You: The more men are freed from privation; the more telegraphs, telephones, books, papers, and journals there are; the more means there will be of diffusing inconsistent lies and hypocrisies, and the more disunited and consequently miserable will men become, which indeed is what we see actually taking place.

The problem is, if you study philosophy and stop believing in a meaning you start to need medical help.

It seems impossible to live without hurting people.' 'That's because it is.' 'So why live at all?' 'Well, in fairness, dying hurts people too. Now, what life do you want to choose next?

She liked this life – or more precisely, she liked the version of herself in this life.

There are more possible ways to play a game of chess than the amount of atoms in the observable universe. So

You see, the language of words was only one of the human languages. There were many others, as I have pointed out. The language of sighs, the language of silent moments, and most significantly, the language of frowns.

A picture of a pipe is not a pipe, as Magritte told us. There is a permanent gap between the signifier and the thing signified. An online profile of your best friend is not your best friend. A status update about a day in the park is not a day in the park. And the desire to tell the world about how happy you are is not how happy you are.

If one advances confidently,' Thoreau had written in Walden, 'in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.' He'd also observed that part of this success was the product of being alone.

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams,' Thoreau had said. 'Live the life you've imagined.' Thoreau had been her favourite philosopher to study. But who seriously goes confidently in the direction of their dreams? Well, apart from Thoreau.

The paradox of volcanoes was that they were symbols of destruction but also life.

The regrets she had been living with most of her life were wasted ones.

So the coffee came and I tasted it—a hot, foul, acidic, dual-carbon compound liquid—and I spat it out all over her. A major breach of human etiquette: apparently, I was meant to swallow

She imagined, now, what it would be like to accept herself completely. Every mistake she had ever made. Every mark on her body. Every dream she hadn't reached or pain she

situations and chemistries didn't change, perspectives could. 'It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.

Grief is a bastard.

To be part of nature was to be part of the will to live. When you stag too long in a place, you forget just how big and expanse the world is. You get no sense of length of those longitudes and latitudes. Just as, she supposed, it is hard to have a sense of the vastness inside any one person. But once you sense the vastness, once something reveals it, hope emerges, whether you want it or not, and it clings to you as stubbornly as lichen clings to rock.

sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness. You can't have one without the other. Of course, they come in different degrees and quantities. But there is no life where you can be in a state of sheer happiness for ever. And imagining there is just breeds more unhappiness in the life you're in.

Pressure makes us, though. You start off as coal and the pressure makes you a diamond.' She didn't correct his knowledge of diamonds. She didn't tell him that while coal and diamonds are both carbon, coal is too impure to be able, under whatever pressure, to become a diamond.

The whole of human history was full of people who tried against the odds. Some succeeded, most failed, but that hadn't stopped them.