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Matt Haig

Matt Haig Quotes

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Famous Matt Haig Quotes

“The illness that you have isn't the illness of a single body part, something you can think outside of. If you have a bad back you can say 'my back is killing me', and there will be a kind of separation between the pain and the self. The pain is something other. It attacks and annoys and even eats away at the self but it is still not the self. But with depression and anxiety the pain isn't something you think about because it is thought. You are not your back but you are your thoughts.”

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Book:The Midnight Library
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“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 it is a by-product of living a certain way, rather than simply living. I mean, it would have made things a lot easier if we understood there was no way of living that can immunise you against sadness. And that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness. You can’t have one without the other. Of course, they come in different degrees and quantities. But there is no life where you can be in a state of sheer happiness for ever. And imagining there is just breeds more unhappiness in the life you’re in.”

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Book:The Midnight Library
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“Possibility is everything that has ever happened. The purpose of science is to find out where the limits of possibility end. When we have achieved that — and we shall — there will be no more magic, no more superstition, there will just be what is. Once it was impossible that this globe we are on wasn't flat. It is not for science — and certainly not for medicine — to flatter our expectations of Nature. Quite the opposite.”

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Book:How to Stop Time
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“The key to happiness - or that even more desired thing, calmness - lies not in always thinking happy thoughts. No. That is impossible. No mind on earth with any kind of intelligence could spend a lifetime enjoying only happy thoughts. They key is in accepting your thoughts, all of them, even the bad ones. Accept thoughts, but don't become them. Understand, for instance, that having a sad thought, even having a continual succession of sad thoughts, is not the same as being a sad person.”

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Book:Reasons to Stay Alive
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“Every second of every day we are entering a new universe. And 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. [...] There are patterns of 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 the particular existence. That it is a by-product of living a certain way, rather than simply living. I mean, it would have made things a lot easier if we understood there was no way of living that can immunise you against sadness. And that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness. You can't have one without the other. Of course, they come in different degrees and quantities. But there is no life where you can be in a state of sheer happiness for ever. And imagining there is just breeds more unhappiness in the life you're in.”

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Author:Matt Haig
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“Of course, we can't visit every place or meet every person or do every job, yet most of what we'd feel in any life is still available. We don't have to play every game to know what winning feels like. We don't have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. We don't have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies. We just have to close our eyes and savour the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays. We are as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum.”

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Book:The Midnight Library
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“وقتی زمان زیادی یک جا می مانی، فراموش می کنی دنیا چقدر وسیع است. هیچ درکی از اندازه ی واقعی نصف النهارها و مدارها پیدا نمی کنی، همان طور که سخت است درکی از وسعت درون هر انسانی داشته باشی. ولی وقتی وسعت را درک کنی، وقتی چیزی گستردگی انسان را به چشمت آشکار کند، امید سر بر می آورد، چه تو بخواهی چه نخواهی، و سرسختانه به تو می چسبد و رهایت نمی کند مثل خزه که صخره را رها نمی کند.”

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Book:The Midnight Library
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“Maybe we should be looking at how we live, and how our minds weren’t made for the lives we lead. Human brains – in terms of cognition and emotion and consciousness – are essentially the same as they were at the time of Shakespeare or Jesus or Cleopatra or the Stone Age. They are not evolving with the pace of change. Neolithic humans never had to face emails or breaking news or pop-up ads or Iggy Azalea videos or a self-service checkout at a strip-lit Tesco Metro on a busy Saturday night. Maybe instead of worrying about upgrading technology and slowly allowing ourselves to be cyborgs we should have a little peek at how we could upgrade our ability to cope with all this change.”

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Book:Reasons to Stay Alive
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“Progress,' wrote C.S. Lewis, 'means getting nearer to the place you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer.' This is a phenomenally good way of looking at it, I think. Forward momentum, on an individual or social level, is not automatically good simply because it is forward momentum. Sometimes we push our lives in the wrong direction. If we feel it is making ourselves unhappy, progress might mean doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road. But we must never feel - personally or s a culture, that only one version of the future is inevitable. The future is ours to shape.”

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Book:Notes on a Nervous Planet
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“What doesn't kill you very often makes you weaker. What doesn't kill you can leave you limping for the rest of your days. What doesn't kill you can make you scared to leave your house, or even your bedroom, and have you trembling, or mumbling incoherently, or leaning with your head on a window pane, wishing you could return to the time before the thing that didn't kill you.”

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Book:Reasons to Stay Alive
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“And, just as it only takes a moment to die, it only takes a moment to live. You just close your eyes and let every futile fear slip away. And then, in this new state, free from fear, you ask yourself: who am I? If I could live without doubt what would I do? If I could be kind without the fear of being fucked over? If I could love without fear of being hurt? If I could taste the sweetness of today without thinking of how I will miss that taste tomorrow? If I could not fear the passing of time and the people it will steal? Yes. What would I do? Who would I care for? What battle would I fight? Which paths would I step down? What joys would I allow myself? What internal mysteries would I solve? How, in short, would I live?”

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Book:How to Stop Time
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“os livros, através das histórias e da ficção, podem ser uma forma de recuperarmos algum espaço. Quando eu tinha 11 anos, sem amigos e com dificuldades de integração na escola, li Os Marginais, Tempos de Juventude e Tex, todos de S. E. Hinton, e subitamente voltei a ter amigos. Os livros que a autora escrevera eram meus amigos. As personagens que ela criara eram minhas amigas. E eram amigos a sério, pois ajudaram-me, tal como, noutras alturas, fui ajudado pelos meus amigos Ursinho Pooh, Scout Finch, Pip ou pela Cécile, de Bonjour Tristesse. As histórias em que eles habitavam eram lugares onde eu me podia esconder e sentir--me em segurança. Os mundos da ficção são essenciais neste planeta que pode tornar-se excessivo, neste planeta em que estamos a ficar sem espaço mental. Esses mundos podem funcionar como um escape à realidade, sim, mas não como escapatória à verdade. É precisamente o contrário. Eu costumava ter dificuldades em integrar-me no mundo “real”. Os códigos que tínhamos de seguir. As mentiras que tínhamos de dizer. Os risos que tínhamos de fingir. Mas eu não sentia que a ficção fosse uma fuga a essas verdades; era uma espécie de porta de entrada nessa realidade. Mesmo que a verdade do livro estivesse repleta de monstros ou ursos falantes, o certo é que havia ali sempre algum tipo de verdade. Uma verdade capaz de manter a nossa sanidade ou, pelo menos, de nos manter na nossa pele. No meu caso, ler nunca foi uma atividade antissocial. Bem pelo contrário, era profundamente social. Ficar intimamente ligado à imaginação de outro ser humano era o tipo de socialização mais profunda que podia existir. Ler era uma forma de me ligar a algo, sem necessidade de passar pelos inúmeros filtros que, geralmente, a sociedade impõe. Muitas vezes, dá-se importância à leitura devido ao valor social. A leitura está associada à educação, à economia, e por aí fora. Mas isso é passar ao lado do verdadeiro sentido da leitura. Ler não é importante por nos ajudar a arranjar um emprego. É importante por nos dar um espaço em que podemos existir para lá da nossa vida real. É a forma de os seres humanos se juntarem. De as mentes se ligarem umas às outras. É a forma dos sonhos, da empatia, da compreensão, do escape. A leitura é amor em ação.”

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Book:Notes on a Nervous Planet
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“... a human looks at a tree it translates the intricately complex mass of leaves and branches into this thing called ‘tree’. To be a human was to continually dumb the world down into an understandable story that keeps things simple. She knew that everything humans see is a simplification. A human sees the world in three dimensions. That is a simplification. Humans are fundamentally limited, generalising creatures, living on auto-pilot, who straighten out curved streets in their minds, which explains why they get lost all the time.”

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Book:The Midnight Library
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“This is the whole stupid thing about all these unblood relationships. They depend on people staying the same, standing in the same spot they were in over a decade ago, when they first met. Surely the reality is that connections between people aren't permanent, but fleeting and random, like a solar eclipse or clouds meeting in the sky. They exist in a constantly moving universe full of constantly moving objects.”

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Book:The Radleys
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“To be a part of nature was to be part of the will to live. When you stay too long in a place, you forget just how big an expanse the world is. You get no sense of the length of those longitudes and latitudes. Just as, she supposed, it is hard to have a sense of the vastness inside any one person. But once you sense that vastness, once something reveals it, hope emerges, whether you want it to or not, and it clings to you as stubbornly as lichen clings to rock.”

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Book:The Midnight Library
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“A gap in the fire that was consuming every other book on the shelf. I don't want to die. She had to try harder. She had to want the life she always thought she didn't. Because just as this library was a part of her, so too were all the other lives. She might not have felt everything she had felt in those lives, but she had the capability. She might have missed those particular opportunities that led her to become an Olympic swimmer, or a traveller, or a vineyard owner, or a rock star, or a planet-saving glaciologist, or a Cambridge graduate, or a mother, or the million other things, but she was still in some way all those people. They were all her. She could have been all those amazing things, and that wasn't depressing, as she had once thought. Not at all. It was inspiring. Because now she saw the kinds of things she could do when she put herself to work. And that, actually, the life she had been living had its own logic to it. Her brother was alive. Izzy was alive. And she had helped a young boy stay out of trouble. What sometimes feels like a trap is actually just a trick of the mind. She didn't need a vineyard or a Californian sunset to be happy. She didn't even need a large house and the perfect family. She just needed potential. And she was nothing if not potential. She wondered why she had never seen it before.”

Matt HaigThe Midnight Library
Book:The Midnight Library
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