Quotessence
Home / Books / Reasons to Stay Alive

Reasons to Stay Alive

Book by Matt Haig · 23 quotes · Depression, Mental Health, Reading

Filter quotes by topic

AllDepressionMental HealthReadingAnxietyInspirationalBooksEmotionsMatt HaigMental IllnessTimeAddAliveBookCalmnessClichésDoubtEmpatheticEndsExpectationExperience

Reasons to Stay Alive Quotes

“And most of all, books. They were, in and of themselves, reasons to stay alive. Every book written is the product of a human mind in a particular state. Add all the books together and you get the end sum of humanity. Every time I read a great book I felt I was reading a kind of map, a treasure map, and the treasure I was being directed to was in actual fact myself.”

MindHumansKindBookEndsStatesReasonFactsTogetherHumanityReadingFeltAliveWrittenParticularProductsAddTreasureMapsHuman MindStaying AliveGreat BookReason To Stay
Book:Reasons to Stay Alive
Create image

“I didn't totally fit in. I kind of disintegrated around people and became what they wanted me to be. But paradoxically, I felt an intensity inside me all the time. I didn't know what it was, but it kept building, like water behind a dam. Later, when I was properly depressed and anxious, I saw the illness as an accumulation of all that thwarted intensity. A kind of breaking through. As though, if you find it hard enough to let your self be free, your self breaks in, flooding your mind in an attempt to drown all those failed half-versions of you.”

SelfDepressionAnxietyMental Illness
Book:Reasons to Stay Alive
Create image

“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.”

HappinessMeditationPositive ThinkingCalmnessNegative Thinking
Book:Reasons to Stay Alive
Create image

“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.”

ScienceTechnologyProgressDepressionHumans And Evolution
Book:Reasons to Stay Alive
Create image

“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.”

InspirationDepressionAnxiety
Book:Reasons to Stay Alive
Create image

“This isn't a magic lamp and I am no genie. There is no set number. It could be one. It could be a hundred. But you only have an infinite number of lives to choose from so long as the time in the Midnight Library stays, well, at midnight. Because while it stays at midnight, your life — your root life — is somewhere between life and death. If time moves here, that means something very...' She searched for a delicate word. '...decisive has happened. Something that razes the Midnight Library to the ground, and takes us with it. And so I would err on the side of caution. I would try to think very keenly about where you want to be. You have clearly made some progress. I can tell. You seem to realise that life could be worth living, if only you found the right one to exist inside. But you don't want that gate to close before you get a chance to go through it.”

Matt HaigThe Midnight Library
Book:Reasons to Stay Alive
Create image

“MEDICATION IS AN incredibly attractive concept. Not just for the person with depression, or the person running a pharmaceutical firm, but for society as a whole. It underlines the idea we have hammered into us by the hundred thousand TV ads we have seen that everything can be fixed by consuming things. It fosters a just-shut-up-and-take-the-pill approach, and creates an “us” and “them” divide, where everyone can relax and feel “unreason”—to borrow Michel Foucault’s favorite word—is being safely neutered in a society that demands we be normal even as it drives us insane.”

MedicationPharmaceuticalsPharma
Book:Reasons to Stay Alive
Create image

“[H]ow much of our lives are we actually living in the present? How much instead are we either excited or worrying about the future, or regretting or mourning the past? Our response to all this worry about time is to try and achieve things before it’s too late. Gain money, improve our status, marry, have children, get a promotion, gain more money, on and on forever. Or rather, not forever. If it were forever, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. But we kind of know that turning life into a desperate race for more stuff is only going to shorten it. Not in years, not in terms of actual time, but in terms of how time feels. Imagine all the time we had was bottled up, like wine. and handed over to us. How would we make that bottle last? By sipping slowly, appreciating the taste, or by gulping?”

TimeMaterialismTime ManagementTime Quotes
Book:Reasons to Stay Alive
Create image

“Ever since I realised that depression lied about the future I have wanted to write a book about my experience, to tackle depression and anxiety head-on. So this book seeks to do two things. To lessen that stigma, and - the possibly more quixotic ambition to try and actually convince people that the bottom of the valley never provides the clearest view. I wrote this because the oldest clichés remain the truest. Time heals. The tunnel does have light at the end of it, even if we aren't able to see it. And there's a two-for-one offer on clouds and silver linings. Words, just sometimes, can set you free.”

TimePerspectiveDepressionMental HealthClichés
Book:Reasons to Stay Alive
Create image