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The Midnight Library Quotes

Browse 458 quotes about The Midnight Library.

The Midnight Library Quotes

“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
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“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
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“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
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“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
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“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
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“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
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“She no longer got surprised by the variations in appearance between lives. She had been every shape and size and had every haircut. In this life, she looked perfectly pleasant. She would have liked to be friends with this person. It wasn't an Olympian or a rock star or a Cirque du Soleil acrobat she was looking at, but it was someone who seemed to be having a good life, as far as you could tell these things. A grown-up who had a vague idea of who she was and what she was doing in life. Short hair, but not dramatically so, skin looking healthier than in her root life, either through diet, a lack of red wine, exercise, or the cleansers and moisturizers she'd seen in the bathroom, which were all more expensive than anything she owned in her root life.”

Matt HaigThe Midnight Library
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“She liked this life — or more precisely she liked the version of herself in this life. She could tell the kind of person she was from the way people spoke to her. It felt nice — comforting, solidifying — to be a good person. Her mind felt different here. She thought a lot in this life, but her thoughts were gentle. 'Compassion is the basis of morality,' the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer had written, in one of his softer moments. Maybe it was the basis of life too.”

Matt HaigThe Midnight Library
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