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Matt Haig Quotes

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Matt Haig Quotes

“To be a part of nature was to be part of the will to live. When you stay too long in a place, you forget just how big an expanse the world is. You get no sense of the length of those longitudes and latitudes. Just as, she supposed, it is hard to have a sense of the vastness inside any one person. But once you sense that vastness, once something reveals it, hope emerges, whether you want it to or not, and it clings to you as stubbornly as lichen clings to rock.”

LifePerspectiveMatt HaigThe Midnight Library
Book:The Midnight Library
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“A gap in the fire that was consuming every other book on the shelf. I don't want to die. She had to try harder. She had to want the life she always thought she didn't. Because just as this library was a part of her, so too were all the other lives. She might not have felt everything she had felt in those lives, but she had the capability. She might have missed those particular opportunities that led her to become an Olympic swimmer, or a traveller, or a vineyard owner, or a rock star, or a planet-saving glaciologist, or a Cambridge graduate, or a mother, or the million other things, but she was still in some way all those people. They were all her. She could have been all those amazing things, and that wasn't depressing, as she had once thought. Not at all. It was inspiring. Because now she saw the kinds of things she could do when she put herself to work. And that, actually, the life she had been living had its own logic to it. Her brother was alive. Izzy was alive. And she had helped a young boy stay out of trouble. What sometimes feels like a trap is actually just a trick of the mind. She didn't need a vineyard or a Californian sunset to be happy. She didn't even need a large house and the perfect family. She just needed potential. And she was nothing if not potential. She wondered why she had never seen it before.”

Matt HaigThe Midnight Library
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“A spark flew from one of the lights and landed on a book, which consequently ignited into a glowing burst of fire. Pretty soon the fire was spreading along the entire shelf, the books burning as rapidly as if they were doused in petrol. A whole stream of hot, raging, roaring amber. Then another spark arced towards a different shelf and that too set alight. At about the same time a large chunk of dusty ceiling landed by Nora's feet.”

Matt HaigThe Midnight Library
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“Listen, I am part of the library. But this whole library is part of you. Do you understand? You don't exist because of the library; this library exists because of you. Remember what Hugo said? He told you that this is the simplest way your brain translates the strange and multifarious reality of the universe. So, this is just your brain translating something. Something significant and dangerous.”

Matt HaigThe Midnight Library
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“Nora walked through the haze of dust and smoke in the direction Mrs. Elm had pointed towards, as the ceiling continued to fall. It was hard to breathe, and to see, but she had just about managed to keep count of the aisles. Sparks from the lights fell onto her head. The dust stuck in her throat, nearly causing her to vomit. But even in the powdery fog she could see that most of the books were now ablaze. In fact, none of the shelves of books seemed intact, and the heat felt like a force. Some of the earliest shelves and books to set on fire were now nothing but ash.”

Matt HaigThe Midnight Library
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“Flinching at the heat, and with a careful index finger, she hooked the top of the spine and pulled the book from the shelf. She then did what she always did. She opened the book and tried to find the first page. But the only difficulty was that there was no first page. There were no words in the entire book. It was completely blank. Like the other books, this was the book of her future. But unlike the others, in this one that future was unwritten. So, this was it. This was her life. Her root life. And it was a blank page.”

Matt HaigThe Midnight Library
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“She started to write. Nora wanted to live. Once she'd finished the inscription she waited a moment. Frustratingly, nothing happened, and she remembered what Mrs. Elm had once said. Want is an interesting word. It means lack. So, she crossed that out and tried again. Nora decided to live. Nothing. She tried again. Nora was ready to live. Still nothing, even when she underlined the word 'live'. Everywhere now, there was breakage and ruination. The ceiling was falling, razing everything, smothering each of the bookshelves into piles of dust. She gaped over and saw the figure of Mrs. Elm, out from under the desk where she had been sheltering Nora, standing there without any fear at all then disappearing completely as the roof caved in almost everywhere, smothering remnants of fire and shelf stacks and all else.”

Matt HaigThe Midnight Library
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“So she stopped trying to think about what to write and, in sheer exasperation, just put down the first thing that came to her, the thing that she felt inside her like a defiant silent roar that could overpower any external destruction. The one truth she had, a truth she was now proud of and please with, a truth she had not only come to terms with but welcomed openly, with every fiery molecule of her being. A truth that she scribbled hastily but firmly, pressing deep into the paper with the nib, in capital letters, in the first-person present tense. A truth that was the beginning and seed of everything possible. A former curse and a present blessing. Three simple words containing the power and potential of a multiverse. I AM ALIVE. And with that, the ground shook like fury and every last remnant of the Midnight Library dissolved into dust.”

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“Through the window, after the nurse had gone, she watched the trees' gentle movements in the afternoon breeze and distant rush-hour traffic shunt slowly along Bedford ring road. It was nothing but trees and traffic and mediocre architecture, but it was also everything. It was life. A little later she deleted her suicidal social media posts, and — in a moment of sincere sentimentality — she wrote something else instead. She titled it 'A Thing I Learned (Written By A Nobody Who Has Been Everybody)'.”

Matt HaigThe Midnight Library
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“You're all I've got, sis,' he said, his voice cracking a little. 'I know I haven't valued you. I know I wasn't always the best, growing up. But I had my own shit going on. Having to be a certain way because of Dad. Hiding my sexuality. I know it wasn't easy for you but it wasn't easy for me either. You were good at everything. School, swimming, music. I couldn't compete...Plus Dad was Dad and I had to be this fake vision of whatever he thought a man was.' He sighed. 'It's weird. We both probably remember it in different ways. But don't leave me, okay? Leaving the band was one thing. But don't leave existence. I couldn't cope with that.”

Matt HaigThe Midnight Library
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“She thought of the grief that had floored her when she had heard about Joe's death by overdose in São Paulo, and she asked him to hug her, and he obliged, delicately, and she felt the living warmth of him. 'Thanks for trying to jump in the river for me,' she said. 'What?' 'I always thought you didn't. But you tried. They pulled you back. Thank you.' He suddenly knew what she was talking about. And maybe more than a little confused about how she knew this, when she had been swimming away from him. 'Ah, sis, I love you. We were young fools.”

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“As her brother headed towards the door of 33A Bancroft Avenue, Nora looked around at all the terraced houses and all the lampposts and trees under the sky, and she felt her lungs inflate at the wonder of being there, witnessing it all as if for the first time. Maybe in one of those houses was another slider, someone on their third or seventeenth or final version of themselves. She would look out for them.”

Matt HaigThe Midnight Library
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“It is quite a revelation to discover that the place you wanted to escape to is the exact same place you escaped from. That the prison wasn't the place, but the perspective. And the most peculiar discovery Nora made was that, of all the extremely divergent variations of herself she had experienced, the most radical sense of change happened within the exact same life. The one she began and ended with. This biggest and most profound shift happened not by becoming richer or more successful or more famous or by being amid the glaciers and polar bears of Svalbard. It happened by waking up in the exact same bed, in the same grotty damp apartment with its dilapidated sofa and yucca plant and tiny potted cacti and bookshelves and untried yoga manuals. There was the same electric piano and books. There was the same sad absence of a feline and lack of a job. There was still the same unknowability about her life ahead. And yet, everything was different. And it was different because she no longer felt she was there simply to serve the dreams of other people. She no longer felt like she had to find sole fulfillment as some imaginary perfect daughter or sister or partner or wife or mother or employee or anything other than a human being, orbiting her own purpose, and answerable to herself. And it was different because she was alive, when she had so nearly been dead. And because that had been her choice. A choice to live. Because she had touched the vastness of life and within that vastness she had seen the possibility not only of what she could do, but also feel. There were other scales and other tunes. There was more to her than a flat line of mild to moderate depression, spiced up with occasional flourishes of despair. And that gave her hope, and even the sheer sentimental gratitude of being able to be here, knowing she had the potential to enjoy watching radiant skies and mediocre Ryan Bailey comedies and be happy listening to music and conversation and beat of her own heart. And it was different because, above all other things, that heavy and painful Book of Regrets had been successfully burnt to dust.”

Matt HaigThe Midnight Library
Book:The Midnight Library
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“Hi Nora. It's me, Doreen.' Nora was excited to hear from her, as she had been in the middle of nearly writing a notice advertising piano lessons. 'Oh Doreen! Can I just apologise about missing the lesson the other day?' 'Water under the bridge.' 'Well, I'm not going to go into all the reasons,' Nora continued, breathlessly. 'But I will just say that I will never be in that situation again. I promise, in future, should you want to continue with Leo's piano lessons, I will be where I am meant to be. I won't let you down. Now, I totally understand if you don't want me to be Leo's piano teacher any more. But I want you to know that Leo is an exceptional talent. He has a feel for the piano. He could end up making a career of it. He could end up at the Royal College of Music. So, I would just like to say if he doesn't continue his lessons with me, I want you to know that I feel he should continue them somewhere. That's all.”

Matt HaigThe Midnight Library
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“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.”

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“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.”

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“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
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“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
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“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
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“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.”

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“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
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“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
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“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
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