Quotes from Matt Haig

I wanted to be dead. No. That's not quite right. I didn't want to be dead, I just didn't want to be alive.

You don't have to be an academic. You don't have to be anything. Don't force it. Feel your way, and don't stop feeling your way until something fits. Maybe nothing will. Maybe you are a road, not a destination. That is fine. Be a road. But make sure it's one with something to look at out of the window.

Advice for a human 86. To like something is to insult it. Love it or hate it. Be passionate. As civilisation advances, so does indifference. It is a disease. Immunize yourself with art. And love.

Laughter, along with madness, seemed to be the only way out, the emergency exit for humans.

Maybe that is what beauty was, for humans. Accidents, imperfections, placed inside a pretty pattern. Asymmetry. The defiance of mathematics.

It made me lonely. And when I say lonely, I mean the kind of loneliness that howls through you like a desert wind. It wasn't just the loss of people I had known but also the loss of myself. The loss of who I had been when I had been with them.

A society which demands we be normal even as it drives us insane.

It was, of course, another test. Everything in human life was a test. That was why they all looked so stressed out.

Your mind is a galaxy. More dark than light. But the light makes it worthwhile. Which is to say, don't kill yourself. Even when the darkness is total. Always know that life is not still. Time is space. You are moving through that galaxy. Wait for the stars.

When you are depressed you feel alone, and that no one is going through quite what you are going through. You are so scared of appearing in any way mad you internalise everything, and you are so scared that people will alienate you further you clam up and don't speak about it, which is a shame, as speaking about it helps.

The best thing about rock bottom is the rock part. You discover the solid bit of you. The bit that can't be broken down further. The thing that you might sentimentally call a soul. At our lowest we find the solid ground of our foundation. And we can build ourselves anew.

There is only one genre in fiction, the genre is called book.

MINDS ARE UNIQUE. They go wrong in unique ways. My mind went wrong in a slightly different way to how other minds go wrong. Our experience overlaps with other people's, but it is never exactly the same experience.

A problem with living in the twenty-first century..... we are made to feel poor on thirty thousand pounds a year. To feel poorly travelled if we have only been to ten other countries. To feel old if we have a wrinkle. To feel ugly if we aren't photo shopped and filtered.

To be human was to continually dumb the world down into an understandable story that keeps things simple.

Remember no one really cares what you look like. They care what they look like. You are the only person in the world to have worried about your face.

The key to happiness wasn't being yourself, because what did that even mean? Everyone had many selves. No. The key to happiness is finding the lie that suits you best.

Never be cool. Never try to be cool. Never worry what the cool people think. Head for the warm people. Life is warmth. You'll be cool when you're dead.

Everyone is a comedy. If people are laughing at you, they just don't quite understand the joke that is themselves.

You can have everything and feel nothing.

There is this idea that you either read to escape or you read to find yourself. I don't really see the difference. We find ourselves through the process of escaping.

Is happiness the aim?" "I don't know. I suppose I want my life to mean something. I want to do something good

Regrets ignore chronology. They float around.

She laughs. It is the simplest, purest joy on earth, I realise, to make someone you care about laugh.