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The Midnight Library

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

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The Midnight Library Quotes

“But as she swam her mood changed. She thought of those years her dad gained and her mother had lost, and as she thought she became angrier and angrier at her father, which fuelled her to swim even faster. She had always imagined her parents were too proud to get divorced, so instead let their resentments fester inside, projecting them onto their children, and Nora in particular. And swimming had been her only ticket to approval.”

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“Why did I stay?' Nora asked. 'Why didn't I just come home, after she died?' Mrs. Elm shrugged. 'You got stuck. You were grieving. You were depressed. You know what depression is like.' Nora understood this. She thought of a study she had read about somewhere, about fish. Fish were more like humans than most people think. Fish get depression. They had done tests with zebrafish. They had a fish tank and they drew a horizontal line on the side of it, halfway down, in marker pen. Depressed fish stayed below the line. But give those same fish Prozac and they go above the line, to the top of their tanks, darting about like new. Fish get depressed when they have a lack of stimulation. A lack of everything. When they are just there, floating in a tank that resembles nothing at all. Maybe Australia had been her empty fish tank, once Izzy had gone. Maybe she just had no incentive to swim above the line. And maybe even Prozac — or fluoxetine — wasn't enough to help her rise up. So she was just going to stay there in that flat, with Jojo, and never move until she was made to leave the country.”

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“The thing she had once loved about swimming was the disappearing. In the water, her focus had been so pure that she thought of nothing else. Any school or home worries vanished. The art of swimming — she supposed like any art — was about purity. The more focused you were on the activity, the less focused you were on everything else. You kind of stopped being you and became the thing you were doing.”

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“Cats.' 'What about them?' 'They've got a parasite. Toxoplas-something.' Nora knew this. She had known this since she was a teen, doing her work experience at Bedford Animal Rescue Centre. 'Toxoplasmosis.' 'That's it! Well, I was listening to this podcast, right...and there's this theory that this international group of billionaires infected the cats with it so that they could take over the world by making humans dumber and dumber. I mean, think about it. There are cats everywhere.”

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“Librarians have knowledge. They guide you to the right books. The right worlds. They find the best places. Like soul-enhanced search engines.' 'Exactly. But you also have to know what you like. What to type into the metaphorical search box. And sometimes you have to try a few things before that becomes clear.' 'I haven't got the stamina. I don't think I can do this.' 'The only way to learn is to live.”

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“As soon as I started winning swimming races, I became seen and I didn't want to be seen. And not only seen but seen in a swimsuit at the exact age you are self-obsessing about your body. Someone said I had boy's shoulders. It was a stupid thing but there were lots of stupid things and you feel them all at that age. As a teenager I'd have happily been invisible. People called me "The Fish". They didn't mean it as a compliment. I was shy. It was one of the reasons why I preferred the library to the playing field. It seems a small thing, but it really helped, having that space.”

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“She had been cross with him saying that. As if there was a very thin path to a happy life and it was the path he had decided for her. As if her own agency in her own life was automatically wrong. But what she didn't fully appreciate at fifteen years of age was just how bad regret could feel, and how much her father had felt that pain of being so near to the realisation of a dream he could almost touch it.”

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“It was hard to remember, exactly, what he had sounded like before. What he had been like, precisely. But that was the nature of memory. At university she had done an essay drily titled 'The Principles of Hobbesian Memory and Imagination.' Thomas Hobbes had viewed memory and imagination as pretty much the same thing, and since discovering that she had never entirely trusted her memories.”

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