Quotes from Matt Haig

I've ridden a bike now for a hundred years and I think they are one of the truly great human inventions.

People with stamina aren't made any differently to anyone else,' she was saying. 'The only difference is they have a clear goal in mind, and a determination to get there. Stamina is essential to stay focused in a life filled with distraction. It is the ability to stick to a task when your body and mind are at their limit, the ability to keep your head down, swimming in your lane, without looking around, worrying who might overtake you . .

Introversion is not something you fix via extroversion. You fix it by seeing it as something not to be fixed. So let introversion exist. Allow those journeys inward as well as outward.

It's never too late to pursue a dream.

We are as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum.

People place so much value on thought, but feeling is as essential. I want to read books that make me laugh and cry and fear and hope and punch the air in triumph. I want a book to hug me or grab me by the scruff of the neck. I don't even mind if it punches me in the gut. Because we are here to feel.

You are, of course, allowed to love food and music and champagne and rare sunny afternoons in October. You can love the sight of waterfalls and the smell of old books, but the love of people is off limits. Do you hear me? Don't attach yourself to people, and try to feel as little as you possibly can for those you do meet. Because otherwise you will slowly lose your mind .

When you stay too long in a place, you forget just how big and expanse the world is. You get no sense of the length of those longitudes and latitudes

And though she'd studied enough existential philosophy to believe loneliness was a fundamental part of being a human in an essentially meaningless universe, it was good to see him.

Quando a loucura se converte em normalidade, a única forma de encontrarmos a sanidade passa pela audácia de sermos diferentes. Ou pela audácia de sermos o eu que existe à margem de todo o entulho com que a vida moderna entope corpo e mente.

The point of love was to help you survive.

variations.

Newton dragging me forward until we reached a large stretch of grass. This is what dogs liked to do, I discovered. They liked tout, I had to admit, it worked for them, and for Newton in particular. It was a collective illusion they had chosen to swallow and they were submitting to it wholeheartedly, without any nostalgia for their former wolf selves.

Cuando te quedas demasiado tiempo en un mismo lugar, olvidas lo gigantesco que es el planeta. Pierdes las referencias y dejas de ser consciente de hasta dónde se extienden los paralelos y los meridianos. Del mismo modo, supuso, uno puede ignorar la vastedad interior de las personas

In a world where possibility is endless, the possibilities for pain and loss and permanent separation are also endless.

Keep reiterating, again and again, that depression is not something you "admit to," it is not something you have to blush about, it is a human experience.

You have the power to do good, and you know it.

immunise you against sadness. And that 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.

The town was a conveyor belt of despair.

Magazines are very popular, despite no human's ever feeling better for having read them. Indeed, their chief purpose is to generate a sense of inferiority in the reader that consequently leads to a feeling of needing to buy something, which the humans then do, and then feel even worse

quote from Henry David Thoreau. All good things are wild and free.

Maar het punt is: je weet niet wat de toekomst brengen zal. Je kijkt naar het nieuws en dat lijkt angstaanjagend. Maar je weet het nooit zeker. Dat is het hele punt met de toekomst. Je weet het niet. Op een gegeven moment moet je accepteren dat je het niet weet. Je moet ophouden met vooruit te bladeren en je gewoon concentreren op de bladzijde waar je bent.

The thought was like a ceaseless mind-cramp, something too uncomfortable to bear yet too strong to avoid.

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 had felt. Every lust or longing she had suppressed. She imaged accepting it all. The way she accepted nature. The way she accepted a glacier or a puffin or the breach of a whale.