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How to Stop Time

Book by Matt Haig · 46 quotes · Love, Living, Time

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How to Stop Time Quotes

“But there was a sense of something tipping out of balance. The times seemed out of joint. There was too much decadence. Too much intensity. Too much change. Too much happiness juxtaposed with too much misery. Too much wealth next to too much poverty. The world was becoming faster and louder, and the social systems were becoming as chaotic and fragmented as jazz scores. So there was a craving, in some places, for simplicity, for order, for scapegoats and for bully-boy leaders, for nations to become like religions or cults. It happened every now and then. It seemed, in the 1930s, that the whole course of humanity was at stake. As it very often does today. Too many people wanted to find an easy answer to complicated questions. It was a dangerous time to be human. To feel or to think or to care.”

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“Marion does not talk much. But when she does talk she swears a lot more. There is a joy she takes in swearing which I suspect she inherited from her aunt Grace. She likes the word 'motherfucker' in particular (not that this particular one was around in her aunt's day). Everything is a motherfucker. For instance, the TV is a motherfucker. (There is 'never anything on the motherfucker'.) Her shoes are motherfuckers. The American president is a motherfucker. Weaving yarn through a loom is a motherfucker. Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy is a motherfucker.”

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“My mother was, in the tradition of parents, quite a complicated and contradictory human being. Moralistic but a devout lover of pleasure (food, music, the aesthetics of nature). Deeply religious but seemingly as comforted by singing a secular chanson as by prayer. A lover of the natural world who was visibly anxious every time she left the castle. Fragile, but also though and stubborn. I never knew how many of her oddities had sprung from grief and how many from her own inherent nature. "There is not one blade of grass, there is no colour in this world that is not intended to make us rejoice," my mother told me once, shortly after arriving in England.”

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“A wave can kill you. Or you can ride it. It's sometimes more dangerous to shy away. You can't live your life in fear. You have to be prepared to get on your board and stand on your feet. If you are in the barrel of a wave you have to ignore the fear. You have to be in that moment. You have to carve on through. You get scared, and the next thing you know you are off your board and smashing your head on a rock. I'm never going to live in fear.”

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“I loved someone once. A woman. I loved her madly. Do you understand? We were together, in secret, for nearly twenty years. And we were told we couldn't talk about that love… because it was dangerous. It was dangerous to love […] There comes a time when the only way to start living is to tell the truth. To be who you really are, even if it is dangerous.”

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“People you love never die. That is what Omai had said, all those years ago. And he was right. They don't die. Not completely. They live in your mind, the way they always lived inside you. You keep their light alive. If you remember them well enough, they can still guide you, like the shine of long-extinguished stars could guide ships in unfamiliar waters.”

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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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“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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