Quotes from Matt Haig

While the Midnight Library stands, Nora, you will be preserved from death. Now, you have to decide how you want to live.

communal kitchen in Longyearbyen

And death only happens to people who have been living. There were infinitely more people who had never been alive. I wanted to be one of those people.

She couldn't even manage 'cat owner'. Or 'one-hour-a week piano tutor'. Or 'human capable of conversation'.

She imagined what it would be like to accept herself completely. Every mistake she had ever made, every dream she hadn't reached or pain she had felt. Every lust or longing she had suppressed. She imagined accepting it all. The way she accepted nature.

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

Life is "understood backward; but it must be lived forward" (Søren Kierkegaard)

on earth, I realise, to make someone you care about laugh.

The values that cause us to want more than we have. To worship work above play. To compare the worst bits of ourselves with the best bits of other people.

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.

Con el tiempo, comprendí que aquel era un planeta de cosas envueltas dentro de cosas: comida dentro de envoltorios, cuerpos dentro de ropas, odio dentro de sonrisas. Todo se escondía.

At the beginning of a game, there are no variations. There is only one way to set up a board. There are nine million variations after the first six moves. And after eight moves there are two hundred and eighty-eight billion different positions. And those possibilities keep growing. [...] In chess, as in life, possibility is the basis of everything. Every hope, every dream, every regret, every moment of living. (p.195)

The longer you live, the more you realise that nothing is fixed. Everyone will become a refugee if they live long enough. Everyone would realise their nationality means little in the long run. Everyone would see their worldviews challenged and disproved. Everyone would realise that the thing that defines a human being is being a human.

Everything changes and nothing changes.

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 'Between life and death there is a library,' she said.

So, we must conclude that madness is sometimes a question of time, and sometimes of postcode.

But it is not lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It's the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people's worst enemy.

Thoreau had written in Walden, 'in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

how can we live in a mad world without ourselves going mad?

War is the answer. To the wrong question.

This is everything I wanted, so why am I not happy? So what was Schopenhauer's answer? Well, if wanting things was the problem, the answer had to be in giving things up. In his language, the cause of suffering is intensity of will.

It is the simplest, purest joy

I felt so terrified and so in love that I realised they – the terror, the love – were one and the same thing.

There are patterns to life... Rhythms. It is so easy, while trapped in just the one life, to imagine that times of sadness or tragedy or failure or fear are a result of that particular existence, That is is a by-product of living a certain way, rather than simply living.