Quotes from Matt Haig

No. It's about everything. It seems impossible to live without hurting people.' 'That's because it is.

It was as though she had reached some state of acceptance about life – that if there was a bad experience, there wouldn't only be bad experiences.

Aunt Carlotta is a lonely woman. She's a lot older than me. She's really an old lady now. She's forty-two. Hardly anyone lives to be forty-two.

was as though she had reached some state of acceptance about life – that if there was a bad experience, there wouldn't only be bad experiences. She realised that she hadn't tried to end her life because she was miserable, but because she had managed to convince herself that there was no way out of her misery.

Er wordt wel gezegd dat je of leest om aan de wereld te ontsnappen of om jezelf te vinden. Ik zie het verschil niet echt.We vinden onszelf door te ontsnappen. Het gaat er niet om waar je bent, maar waar je heen wilt, en zo.

Where was that love before? Where did you acquire it from? The way it is suddenly there, total and complete, as sudden as grief, but in reverse, is one of the wonders about being human.

Even death was something Nora couldn't do properly, it seemed. It was a familiar feeling. This feeling of being incomplete in just about every sense. An unfinished jigsaw of a human. Incomplete living and incomplete dying.

see the act of learning as something not for its own sake but because of what it will get you reduces the wonder of humanity. We are thinking, feeling, art-making, knowledge-hungry, marvelous animals, who understand ourselves and our world through the act of learning. It is an end in itself. It has far more to offer than the things

You gave up the universe for a life on the sofa?' 'I didn't realise that at the time.

Some humans not only liked violence but craved it, I realized. Not because they wanted pain, but because they already had pain and wanted to be distracted from that kind of pain with a lesser kind.

if you look at the Domesday Book, the average size of an English community at that time was a hundred and fifty people. Except in Kent. Where it was a hundred people. I'm from Kent. We have anti-social DNA.

Places don't matter to people anymore. Places aren't the point. People are only ever half present where they are these days. They always have one foot in the great digital nowhere.

I suppose I want my life to mean something. I want to do something good.

Professor Jonathan Rottenberg, an evolutionary psychologist and author of The Depths

The news should start with mathematics, then poetry, and move down from there.

There is no shame in disconnecting.

I like this job. I can't right now think of a better purpose in life than to be a teacher. To teach feels like you are a guardian of time itself, protecting the future happiness of the world via the minds that are yet to shape it. It isn't playing the lute for Shakespeare, or the piano at Ciro's, but it's something as good. And goodness has its own kind of harmony.

Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. There is a power and a beauty in unproved conjectures, unkissed lips, and unpicked flowers.

you should remember that a pawn is the most magical piece of all. It might look small and ordinary but it isn't. Because a pawn is never just a pawn. A pawn is a queen-in-waiting. All you need to do is find a way to keep moving forward.

I)t was different because she was alive, when she had so nearly been dead. And because that had been her choice. A choice to live. Because she had touched the vastness of life and within that vastness she had seen the possibility not only of what she could do, but also feel.

It was a planet full of tests and meta-tests. I suppose they loved tests so much because they believed in free will.

Bands don't last. We'd have been a meteor shower. Over before we started. "Meteor showers are fucking beautiful.

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

Yes. The cat guy. He said that in quantum physics every alternative possibility happens simultaneously. All at once. In the same place. Quantum superposition. The cat in the box is both alive and dead. You could open the box and see that it was alive or dead, that's how it goes, but in one sense, even after the box is open, the cat is still both alive and dead.