Quotes from Matt Haig

A human life is on average eighty Earth years or around thirty thousand Earth days. Which means they are born, they make some friends, eat a few meals, they get married or they don't get married, have a child or two, or not, drink a few thousand glasses of wine, have sexual intercourse a few times, discover a lump somewhere, feel a bit of regret, wonder where all the time went, know they should have done it differently, realize they would have done it the same, and then they die.

Ignore stigma. Every illness had stigma once. We are getting ill, and fear tends to lead to prejudice before information. Polio used to be erroneously blamed on poor people, for instance. And depression is often seen as a "weakness" or personality failing.

Now, consider this. A human life is on average 80 Earth years or around 30,000 Earth days. Which means they are born, they make some friends, eat a few meals, they get married, or they don't get married, have a child or two, or not, drink a few thousand glasses of wine, have sexual intercourse a few times, discover a lump somewhere, feel a bit of regret, wonder where all the time went, know they should have done it differently, realise they would have done it the same, and then they die.

So, in this life, she was doing her bit to save the planet. Or at least to monitor the steady devastation of the planet in order to alert people to the facts of environmental crisis. That was potentially depressing but also a good and ultimately fulfilling thing to do, she imagined. There was purpose. There was meaning.

There is a world in which he lives and there is a world in which he is dead. And the move between the two happens with no greater ricochet than the whisper of waves crashing onto distant rocks.

The Book of Regrets 'Every regret you have ever had, since the day you were born, is recorded in here

every moment of our life is a . . . kind of turning.

She stared at her own window. She thought of herself in her root life, hovering between life and death in her bedroom – equidistant, as it were. And, for the first time, Nora worried about herself as if she was actually someone else. Not just another version of her, but a different actual person. As though finally, through all the experiences of life she now had, she had become someone who pitied her former self. Not in self-pity, because she was a different self now.

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

The impossible, I suppose, happens via living.

Of course, travel isn't always a solution. Or even an option. But it certainly helps me, when I get the chance to go away. I think, more than anything, it helps give a sense of perspective. We might be stuck in our minds, but we aren't physically stuck. And unsticking ourselves from our physical location can help dislodge our unhappy mental state. Movement is the antidote to fixedness, after all. And it helps. Sometimes. Just sometimes

never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

The kind of smile no one is capable of before the age of forty. The kind that contains sadness and defiance and amusement all at once.

People believed in witches because it made things easier. People don't just need an enemy, they need an explanation. And it's often useful, in unsettled times, where ignorance is everywhere, for people to believe in witches . . . Who do you think believed in witches?

Because too often our view of success is about some external bullshit idea of achievement – an Olympic medal, the ideal husband, a good salary. And we have all these metrics that we try and reach. When really success isn't something you measure, and life isn't a race you can win. It's all . . . bollocks, actually .

Running… "became a kind of metaphor for depression. To go on a run every day is to have a kind of battle with yourself. Just getting out on a cold February morning gives you a sense of achievement. But that voiceless debate you have with yourself - I want to stop! No, keep going! I can't, I can hardly breathe! There's only a mile to go! I just need to lie down! You can't! - is the debate of depression, but on a smaller and less serious scale.

That's the thing with time, isn't it? It's not all the same. Some days – some years – some decades – are empty. There is nothing to them. It's just flat water. And then you come across a year, or even a day, or an afternoon. And it is everything. It is the whole thing.

imagined seeing herself as just another brilliant freak of nature. Just another sentient animal, trying their best. And in doing so, she imagined what it was like to be free.

It's hard to predict, isn't it? The things that will make us happy.

Will my life be miraculously free from pain, despair, grief, heartbreak, hardship, loneliness, depression? No. But do I want to live? Yes. *Yes.* A thousand times, yes.

Depression can be exacerbated by things being all right externally, because the gulf between what you are feeling and what you are expected to feel becomes larger. If you feel the same amount of depression as someone would naturally feel in a prisoner of war camp, but you are not in a prisoner of war camp, and are instead in a nice semi-detached house in a free world, then you think "Crap, this is everything I ever wanted, why aren't I happy?

It is a popular modern idea. That the inner us is something different to the outer us. That there is an authentic realer and better and richer version of ourselves which we can only tap into by buying a solution. This idea that we are separate from our nature, as separate as a bottle of Dior perfume is from the plants of a forest.

He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being man. Do you know what I think? I think you are finding yourself. You were lost. You didn't even know who or what you were. You had no purpose. You were living in poverty. You were moping around, burning yourself to feel something. Now look. You have purpose.

Yes, she was different now. She was stronger. She had untapped things inside her. Things she might never have known about if she'd never sung in an arena or fought off a polar bear or felt so much love and fear and courage.