Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Matt Haig

Quote by Matt Haig

Work

The Midnight Library

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Matt Haig
Matt Haig

Matt Haig is a British novelist born in 1975. His works are known for their humor and profound emotional insight, enjoying great popularity among readers. Haig's writing spans a variety of genres, including science fiction, fantasy, and realism. more

You May Also Like

“Nora listened to this as she stared at the bubbles rising in her mineral water. 'I think it is easy to imagine there are easier paths,' she said, realising something for the first time. 'But maybe there are no easy paths. There are just paths. In one life, I might be married. In another, I might be working in a shop. I might have said yes to this cute guy who aske me out for a coffee. In another I might be researching glaciers in the Arctic Circle. In another, I might be an Olympic swimming champion. Who knows? 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.”

Matt HaigThe Midnight Library
Book:The Midnight Library
Create image

“She remembered, as she watched herself, the aches in her shoulders and arms. The stiff heaviness of them, as if she'd been wearing armour. She remembered not understanding why, for all that effort, the silhouette of the sycamore trees stubbornly stayed the same size, just as the bank stayed exactly the same distance away. She remembered swallowing some of the dirty water. And looking around at the other bank, the bank from where she had come and the place where she was kind of now standing, watching, along with that younger version of her brother and his friends, beside her, oblivious to her present self, and to the bookshelves on either side of them. She remembered how, in her delirium, she had thought of the word 'equidistant'. A word that belonged in the clinical safety of a classroom. Equidistant. Such a neutral, mathematical kind of word, and one that became a stuck thought, repeating itself like a manic meditation as she used the last of her strength to stay almost exactly where she was. Equidistant. Equidistant. Equidistant. Not aligned to one bank or the other. That was how she had felt most of her life. Caught in the middle. Struggling, flailing, just trying to survive while not knowing which way to go. Which path to commit to without regret.”

Matt HaigThe Midnight Library
Book:The Midnight Library
Create image

“Life is always an act,' Mrs. Elm said, as they watched her brother being pulled back from the water's edge by his friends. As he then watched a girl whose name she'd long forgotten make an emergency call. 'And you acted when it counted. You swam to that bank. You clawed yourself out. You coughed your guts out and had hypothermia but you crossed the river, against incredible odds. You found something inside you.”

Matt HaigThe Midnight Library
Book:The Midnight Library
Create image