Quotes from Matt Haig

So what, you have a label? "Depressive." Everyone would have a label if they asked the right professional.

Oh fuck,' whispered Nora, into the cold.

There was absolutely nothing wrong with this life, but she felt inside her a craving for other things, other lives, other possibilities. She felt like she was still in the air, not ready to land.

I miss you,' she said into the air, as if the spirits of every person she'd loved were in the room with her.

A person was like a city.

That feeling you have, that everything is going to get worse, is just a symptom.

We are as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum. We only need to be one person. We only need to feel one existence. We don't have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility.

That the prison wasn't the place, but the perspective

Like soul-enhanced search engines.

don't think of me as a sexy vampire

The idea that you have one true love, that no one else will compare after they have gone. It's a sweet idea, but the reality is terror itself. To be faced with all those lonely years after. To exist when the point of you has gone.

Esquivaré en mi vida, milagrosamente, el dolor, la desesperanza, la pérdida, el desamor, las penurias, la soledad, la depresión? No. Pero ¿quiero vivir? Sí. Sí, desde luego Mil veces, sí.

That is what we were like. In a way we argued because we knew it would have no fundamental impact. When you can be yourself around someone, you project your dissatisfied self outward.

Basically it says that the world is what we recognize in our own will. Humans are ruled by their basic desires and this leads to suffering and pain, because our desires make us crave things from the world but the world is nothing but representation. Because those same cravings shape what we see. We end up feeding from ourselves, until we go mad. And end up in here.

People only see the truth if it is close enough to their reality.

Si vous êtes le type de personne qui pense trop aux choses, alors rien n'est plus solitaire au monde que d'être entouré d'un tas de gens qui ne sont pas sur la même longueur d'ondes.

I understand that the way you stop time is by stopping being ruled by it.

No, the shock was that she felt like she was about to live. Or at least, that she could imagine wanting to be alive again. And she wanted to do something good with that life.

Dear Whoever, I had all the chances to make something of my life, and I blew every one of them. Through my own carelessness and misfortune, the world has retreated from me, and so now it makes perfect sense that I should retreat from the world. If I felt it was possible to stay, I would. But I don't. And so I can't. I make life worse for people. I have nothing to give. I'm sorry.

She wanted to have a purpose, something to give her a reason to exist.

Ain't no choice in love and life

It seems that worrying about growing old is a sign you are young. And the main reason to be optimistic about old age is that old people themselves are. Resilience seems to grow.

Too many memories. Too many ghosts. It was time to be someone else again. I suppose the way I understand my life is as a kind of Russian doll, with different versions inside other versions, each one enclosing the other, whereby the life before isn't seen from the outside but is still there.

This biggest and most profound shift happened not be becoming richer or more successful or more famous or by being amid the glaciers and polar bears of Svalbard. It happened by waking up in the exact same bed, in the same grotty damp apartment with its dilapidated sofa bed and yucca plant and tiny potted cacti and bookshelves and untried yoga manuals.