Quotessence
Home / Books / The Midnight Library

The Midnight Library

Book by Matt Haig · 50 quotes · Matt Haig, The Midnight Library, Life

Filter quotes by topic

AllMatt HaigThe Midnight LibraryLifeRegretLife PhilosophySadnessLife And LivingLife LessonsPhilosophyDepressionFearHopeInspirationalLife QuotesLonelinessRealityAcceptanceBeing AliveConnectionHappiness

The Midnight Library Quotes

“It can be lonely,' Mrs. Elm said. 'Being here. Just sitting. I felt like the game was up. Like a lonely king on a board. You see, I don't know how you remember me, but outside of school I wasn't always the—' She hesitated. 'I've let people down. I haven't always been easy. I've done things I regret. I was a bad wife. Not always a good mother, either. People have given up a little on me, and I don't entirely blame them.”

Matt HaigThe Midnight Library
Book:The Midnight Library
Create image

“Yes, being a parent was exhausting, but Molly was easy to love, at least in daylight hours. In fact, Nora often preferred it when Molly was home from school because it added a bit of challenge to what was otherwise a rather frictionless existence. No relationship stress, no work stress, no money stress. It was a lot to be grateful for. There were inevitably shaky moments. She felt the familiar feeling of being in a play for which she didn't know the lines.”

Matt HaigThe Midnight Library
Book:The Midnight Library
Create image

“On nights when he was home early enough to cook, he made a great lentil dal and a pretty good penne arrabbiata, and tended to put a whole bulb of garlic in every meal he created. But Molly had been absolutely right: his artistic talents didn't extend to musical ability. In fact, when he sang 'The Sound of Silence', accompanied by his guitar, she found herself guiltily wishing he would take the title literally.”

Matt HaigThe Midnight Library
Book:The Midnight Library
Create image

“Occasionally she felt wisps of gentle depression float around her, for no real reason, but it wasn't comparable to how terrible she had felt in her root life, or indeed many of her other lives. It was like comparing a bit of a sniffle to pneumonia. When she thought about how bad she had felt the day she lost her job at String Theory, of the despair, of the lonely and desperate yearning to not exist, then this was nowhere near.”

Matt HaigThe Midnight Library
Book:The Midnight Library
Create image

“Science distrusts anything that sounds too cool. Too sci-fi. Scientists are sceptics, as a rule.' 'Exactly, yet physicists believe in parallel universes.' 'It's just where the science leads, isn't it? Everything in quantum mechanics and string theory all points to there being multiple universes. Many many universes.' 'Well, what would you say if I said that I have visited my other lives, and I think I have chosen this one?' 'I would think you were insane. But I'd still like you.”

Matt HaigThe Midnight Library
Book:The Midnight Library
Create image

“Did you ever get pissed off with me? You know, for backing out of the band?' 'That was years ago, sis. Lots of water under the bridge since then.' 'You wanted to be a rock star, though.' 'He still is a rock star,' said Ewan, laughing. 'But he's all mine.' 'I always feel like I let you down, Joe.' 'Well, don't...But I feel like I let you down too. Because I was such an idiot...I was horrid to you for a little while.' These words felt like a tonic she had been waiting years to hear. 'Don't worry about it,' she managed.”

Matt HaigThe Midnight Library
Book:The Midnight Library
Create image

“This sort-of déjà-vu happened increasingly. Yes, of course there were the occasional slip-ups she made — like 'forgetting' Ash had asthma (which he tried to keep under control via running): 'How long have you had it?' 'Since I was seven.' 'Oh yes, of course. I thought you'd said eczema.' 'Nora, are you okay?' 'Yes. Um, fine. It's just I had some wine with Lara at lunch and I feel a bit spaced out.' But slowly, these slip-ups became less frequent. It was as though each day was a piece fitting into a puzzle and, with each piece added, it became easier to know what the absent pieces were going to look like. Whereas in every other life she had been continually grasping for clues and feeling like she was acting, in this one she increasingly found that the more she relaxed into it, the more things came to her.”

Matt HaigThe Midnight Library
Book:The Midnight Library
Create image

“Nora felt something inside her all at once. A kind of fear, as real as the fear she had felt on the Arctic skerry, face to face with the polar bear. A fear of what she was feeling. Love. You could eat in the finest restaurants, you could partake in every sensual pleasure, you could sing on stage in São Paulo to twenty thousand people, you could soak up whole thunderstorms of applause, you could travel to the ends of the Earth, you could be followed by millions on the internet, you could win Olympic medals, but this was all meaningless without love. And when she thought of her root life, the fundamental problem with it, the thing that had left her vulnerable, really, was the absence of love. Even her brother hadn't wanted her in that life. There had been no one, once Volts had died. She had loved no one, and no one had loved her back. She had been empty, her life had been empty, walking around, faking some kind of human normality like a sentient mannequin of despair. Just the bare bones of getting through. Yet there, right there in that garden of Cambridge, under that dull grey sky, she felt the power of it, the terrifying power of caring deeply and being cared for deeply. Okay, her parents were still dead in this life but here there was Molly, there was Ash, there was Joe. There was a net of love to break her fall. And yet she sensed deep down that it would all come to an end, soon. She sensed that, for all the perfection here, there was something wrong amid the rightness. And the thing that was wrong couldn't be fixed because the flaw was the righteousness itself. Everything was right, and yet she hadn't earned this. She had joined the movie halfway. She had taken the book from the library, but truthfully, she didn't own it. She was watching her life as if from behind a window. She was, she began to feel, a fraud. She wanted this to be her life. As in her real life. And it wasn't and she just wished she could forget that fact. She really did.”

Matt HaigThe Midnight Library
Book:The Midnight Library
Create image

“She stared at her own window. She thought of herself in her root life, hovering between life and death in her bedroom — equidistant, as it were. And, for the first time, Nora worried about herself as if she was actually someone else. Not just another version of her, but a different actual person. As though finally, through all the experiences of life she now had, she had become someone who pitied her former self. Not in self-pity, because she was a different self now.”

Matt HaigThe Midnight Library
Book:The Midnight Library
Create image

“Nora felt herself weaken. Not just tingles and fuzziness but something stronger, a sense of plunging into nothingness, accompanied by a brief darkening of her vision. A feeling of another Nora right there in the wings, ready to pick up where this one left off. Her brain ready to fill in the gaps and have a perfectly legitimate reason to be on a day trip to Bedford, and to fill in every absence as if she was here the whole time.”

Matt HaigThe Midnight Library
Book:The Midnight Library
Create image

“Driving back to Cambridge cocooned in her expensive Audi, smelling almost nauseatingly of vinyl and plastic and other synthetic materials, weaving through busy traffic, the cars sliding by like forgotten lives, she was deeply wishing she had been able to see Mrs. Elm, the real one, before she had died. It would have been good to have one last game of chess with her before she passed away. And she thought of poor Leo, sat in a small windowless cell at a Bedford police station, waiting for Doreen to come and collect him. 'This is the best life,' she told herself, a little desperate now. 'This is the best life. I am staying here. This is the life for me. This is the best life. This is the best life.' But she knew she didn't have long.”

Matt HaigThe Midnight Library
Book:The Midnight Library
Create image

“And then Molly asked if she could get the watering can out and Ash explained that as it had been raining a lot recently it wasn't necessary, because the sky had been looking after the flowers. 'They'll be okay. They're looked after. The flowers have water.' And the words echoed in Nora's mind. They'll be okay. They're looked after...And then Ash said something about going to the cinema tonight and how the babysitter was all arranged and Nora had forgotten completely but just smiled and tried really hard to hold on, to stay there, but it was happening, it was happening, she knew it from within every hidden chamber of her being, and there was absolutely nothing she could do to stop it.”

Matt HaigThe Midnight Library
Book:The Midnight Library
Create image

“Nora remembered the night Ash knocked on her door. Maybe lifting a dead cat off the road and carrying it in the rain around to her flat's tiny back garden and the burying it on her behalf because she was sobbing drunkenly with grief wasn't the most archetypally romantic thing in the world. But it certainly qualified as kind, to take forty minutes out of your run and help someone in need while only accepting a glass of water in return. She hadn't really been able to appreciate that kindness at the time. Her grief and despair had been too strong. But now she thought about it, it had really been quite remarkable.”

Matt HaigThe Midnight Library
Book:The Midnight Library
Create image

“The girl was staring at her in a way no one had stared at her before. It was scary, the emotion. She had Nora's mouth. And that slightly lost look that people had sometimes attributed to her. She was beautiful and she was hers — or kind of hers — and she felt a swell of irrational love, a surge of it, and knew — if the library wasn't coming for her right now (and it wasn't) — that she had to get away.”

Matt HaigThe Midnight Library
Book:The Midnight Library
Create image

“She felt her face and it was creased from where she had been lying, and her hair — which was longer in this life — felt dirty and bedraggled. She tried to make herself look as presentable as it was possible to look in the two seconds before the arrival of a man she simultaneously slept with every night and also hadn't ever slept with. Schrödinger's husband, so to speak. And then, suddenly, there he was.”

Matt HaigThe Midnight Library
Book:The Midnight Library
Create image