Quotes from Matt Haig

there are millions going through an equivalent experience at any one time.

How to be kinder to yourself about yourself Think of people you have loved. Think of the deepest relationships you have ever had. Think of the joy you felt when seeing those people. Think of how that joy had nothing to do with their looks except that they looked like themselves and you were pleased to see them. Be your own friend. Be pleased to recognize the person behind your face.

inventions of things which they have no idea how to handle (the atomic bomb, the Internet, the semi-colon)

we spend so much time wishing our lives were different, comparing ourselves to other people and to other versions of ourselves, when really most lives contain degrees of good and degrees of bad.

You lose your job, then more shit happens. The wind whispered through the trees. It began to rain.

Devi essere una noce». «La gente rompe le noci e le mangia».

Don't worry when people don't like you. Not everyone will like you. Better to be disliked for being you, than being liked for being someone else. Life isn't a play. Don't rehearse yourself. Be yourself.

Reading isn't important because it helps to get you a job. It's important because it gives you room to exist beyond the reality you're given.

The sky isn't more beautiful if you have perfect skin. Music doesn't sound more interesting if you have a six-pack. Dogs aren't better company if you're famous. Pizza tastes good regardless of your job title. The best of life exists beyond the things we are encouraged to crave.

I was not told to provide this document of human life. That was not in my brief. Yet I feel obliged to do so to explain some remarkable features of human existence. I hope you will thereby understand why I chose to do what, by now, some of you must know I did.

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. One square after another. And you can get to the other side and unlock all kinds of power.

Acres of disappointment and monotony and hurts and rivalries but with flashes of wonder and beauty. Maybe that was the only meaning that mattered. To be the world, witnessing itself.

Books might be one way to recover some space. Stories. Fiction. When I was eleven, friendless, struggling to fit in at school, I read The outsiders and Rumble Fish and Tex by S.E. Hinton, and I suddenly had friends again. Her books were friends.. And the stories they inhabited could be places I could hide inside. And feel safe. In a world that can get too much, a world where we are running out of mind space, fictional worlds are essential. They can be an escape from reality.

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. There are more possible ways to play a game of chess than the amount of atoms in the observable universe. So it gets very messy. And

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

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – / I took the one less travelled by, / And that has made all the difference . . .

So, I thought to myself as I walked away, this is what happens when you live on Earth. You crack. You hold reality in your hands until it burns and then you have to drop the plate.

Because if you believe in them as fact, you are saying the thing that every unpopular scientific breakthrough in history has said." "Which is what?" "That humans are not at the center of things.

But know this. Men are not from Mars. Women are not from Venus. Do not fall for categories. Everyone is everything. Every ingredient inside a star is inside you, and every personality that ever existed competes in the theater of your mind for the main role.

A world full of people hating themselves is not a happy world.

But as things made their decline from ripeness, they could taste wonderful, I realized.

The many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics suggests there are an infinite number of divergent parallel universes. Every moment of your life you enter a new universe. With every decision you make.

ROY NEARY: Just close your eyes and hold your breath and everything will turn real pretty. —Steven Spielberg, Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Human beings, as a rule, simply don't accept things that don't fit their worldview.