Quotes from Matt Haig

Happy moments can turn into pain, given time

One of the brighter humans, a German-born theoretical physicist called Albert Einstein, explained relativity to dimmer members of his species by telling them, "Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute.

Had we been through some trauma we didn't know about? Was the noise and speed of modern life the trauma for our caveman brains? Was I that soft? Or was life a kind of war most people didn't see?

in California, the only way to look like you are getting older is to look like you are getting younger. If you could move your forehead over the age of forty then people become very suspicious.

There are things I have experienced that I will never again be able to experience for the first time: love, a kiss, Tchaikovsky, a Tahitian sunset, jazz, a hot dog, a Bloody Mary. That is the nature of things. History was – is – a one-way street. You have to keep walking forwards. But you don't always need to look ahead. Sometimes you can just look around and be happy right where you are.

She realized it wasn't her fault that her parents had never been able to love her the way parents were meant to: without condition.

Sometimes, the only way to learn is to live

You don't need to exhaust yourself trying to find your own value. You are not an iPhone needing an upgrade. Your value is not a condition of productivity or exercise or body shape or something you lose via inactivity. Value is not a plate that needs to be continually spun. The value is there. It is intrinsic, innate. It is in the "being" not the "doing".

To be calm becomes a kind of revolutionary act. To be happy with your own nonupgraded existence. To be comfortable with our messy, human selves, would not be good for business.

seemed the more lives she lived, the harder it was to feel at home anywhere.

You are no longer insulated; but I suppose you must touch life in order to spring from it."' 'What's that? A quote?' I ask. 'Fitzgerald.

If you really want to live a life hard enough, you don't have to worry. You will stay there as if you have always been there. Because in one universe you have always been there. The book will never be returned, so to speak. It becomes less of a loan and more of a gift. The moment you decide you want that life, really want it, then everything that exists in your head now, including this Midnight Library, will eventually be a memory so vague and intangible it will hardly be there at all.

this collision between one's image of oneself and what one actually is is always very painful and there are two things you can do about it, you can meet the collision head-on and try and become what you really are or you can retreat and try to remain what you thought you were, which is a fantasy, in which you will certainly perish." —James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name

Leggere non è importante perché aiuta a trovare lavoro. È importante perché fornisce uno spazio per esistere al di là della realtà che ci è data.

Just as every object on earth contains similar and interchanging atoms, so every fragment of time contains aspects of every other.

Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices .

Maybe even the most seemingly perfectly intense or worthwhile lives ultimately felt the same.

a monster who meets a miracle would see a monster'.

Erwin Schrödinger . . .' 'He of the cat.' 'Yes. The cat guy.

can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. Sylvia Plath

I was named after Bob Dylan. Did I ever tell you that?

You have no control over who people think you are. So don't worry.

California, the only way to look like you are getting older is to look like you are getting younger. If you can move your forehead over the age of forty then people become very suspicious.

Speaking to a human you cared about, I realised, was so fraught with hidden danger that it was a wonder people bothered speaking at all.