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The Midnight Library Quotes

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The Midnight Library Quotes

“After Per died, I couldn't stand to be in Oslo any more. All those people that weren't him, you know? There was this coffee shop we used to go to, at the university. We'd just sit together, together but silent. Happy silent. Reading newspapers, drinking coffee. It was hard to avoid places like that. We used to walk around everywhere. His troublesome soul lingered on every street...I kept telling his memory to piss the fuck off but it wouldn't. Grief is a bastard. If I'd have stayed any longer, I'd have hated humanity. So, when a research position came up in Svalbard I was like, yes, this has come to save me...I wanted to be somewhere he had never been. I wanted somewhere where I didn't have to feel his ghost. But the truth is, it only half-works, you know? Places are places and memories are memories and life is fucking life. Nora took all this in. Ingrid was clearly telling this to someone she thought she knew reasonably well, and yet Nora was a stranger. It felt odd. Wrong. This must be the hardest bit about being a spy, she thought. The emotion people store in you, like a bad investment. You feel like you are robbing people of something.”

Matt HaigThe Midnight Library
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“She had thought, in her nocturnal and suicidal hours, that solitude was the problem. But that was because it hadn't been true solitude. The lonely mind in the busy city yearns for connection because it thinks human-to-human connection is the point of everything. But amid pure nature (or the 'tonic of wildness' as Thoreau called it) solitude took on a different character. It became in itself a kind of connection. A connection between herself and the world. And between her and herself.”

Matt HaigThe Midnight Library
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“She remembered a conversation she'd had with Ash. Tall and slightly awkward and cute and forever in need of a new songbook for his guitar. The chat hadn't been in the shop but in the hospital, when her mother was ill. Shortly after discovering she had ovarian cancer, she had needed surgery. Nora had taken her mum to see all the consultants at Bedford General Hospital, and she had held her mum's hand more in those few weeks than in all the rest of their relationship put together.”

Matt HaigThe Midnight Library
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“And that had led to them talking about social media — he believed that the more people were connected on social media, the lonelier society became. 'That's why everyone hates each other nowadays,' he reckoned. 'Because they are overloaded with non-friend friends. Ever heard about Dunbar's number?' And then he had told her about a man called Roger Dunbar at Oxford University, who had discovered that human beings were wired to know only a hundred and fifty people, as that was the average size of hunter-gatherer communities. 'And the Domesday Book.' Ash had told her, under the stark lighting of the hospital canteen, 'if you look at the Domesday Book, the average size of an English community at that time was a hundred and fifty people. Except in Kent. Where it was a hundred people. I'm from Kent. We have anti-social DNA.' 'I've been to Kent,' Nora had countered. 'I noticed that. But I like that theory. I can meet that many people on Instagram in an hour.' 'Exactly. Not healthy! Our brains can't handle it. Which is why we crave face-to-face communication more than ever. And...which is why I would never buy my Simon & Garfunkel guitar chord songbooks online!”

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“There was no hatred in the polar bear's stare. Nora was just food. Meat. And that was a humbling kind of terror. Her heart poured like a drummer reaching the crescendo. The end of the song. And it became astoundingly clear to her, finally, in that moment: She didn't want to die. And that was the problem. In the face of death, life seemed more attractive, and as life seemed more attractive, how could she get back to the Midnight Library? She had to be disappointed in a life, not just scared of it, in order to try again with another book.”

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“There was death. Violent, oblivious death, in bear form, staring at her with its black eyes. And she knew then, more than she'd known anything, that she wasn't ready to die. This knowledge grew bigger than fear itself as she stood there, face to face with a polar bear, itself hungry and desperate to exist, and banged the ladle against the saucepan. Harder. A fast, staccato bang bang bang.”

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“Lorenzo married a local English woman called Patricia Brown, who was also getting used to life's disappointments, having exchanged her dream of being an actress for the mundane, daily theatre of the suburban housewife, and whose culinary skills were forever under the ghostly shadow of her dead Puglian mother-in-law and her legendary spaghetti dishes, which, in Lorenzo's eyes, could never be surpassed.”

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“On both sides of her family there had been an unspoken belief that life was meant to fuck you over. Nora's dad, Geoff, had certainly lived a life that seemed to miss its target. He had grown up with only a mother, as his dad died of a heart attack when he was two, cruelly hiding somewhere behind his first memories. Nora's paternal grandmother had been born in rural Ireland but emigrated to England to become a school cleaner, struggling to bring in enough money for food, let alone anything approaching fun.”

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“At first she couldn't see the faces, because the lights were pointing towards her, and beyond that glare everything seemed like darkness. Except for a mesmerizing milky way of camera flashes and phone torches. She could hear them, though. Human beings when there's enough of them together acting in total unison become something else. The collective roar made her think of another kind of animal entirely. It was at first kind of threatening, as if she was Hercules facing the many-headed Hydra who wanted to kill him, but this was a roar of total support, and the power of it gave her a kind of strength. She realised, in that moment, that she was capable of a lot more than she had known.”

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“Oh. Yeah, well, that might be bad. But it might not be. You do realise there are infinite possibilities here? I mean, the multiverse isn't about just some universes. It's not about a handful of universes. It's not even about a lot of universes. It's about an infinite number of universes. Even with you in them. You could be you in any version of the world, however unlikely that world would be. You are only limited by your imagination. You can be very creative with the regrets you want to undo. I once undid a regret about not doing something I'd contemplated as a teenager — doing aerospace engineering and becoming an astronaut — and so in one life I became an astronaut. I haven't been to space. But I became someone who had been there, for a little while. The thing you have to remember is that this is an opportunity and it is rare and we can undo any mistake we made, live any life we want. Any life. Dream big...You can be anything you want to be. Because in one life, you are.”

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“He was close to her now. There was something equally annoying and attractive about Hugo. He exuded an arrogant amorality that made his face something to either slap or kiss, depending on the circumstance. 'In one life we have known each other for years and are married...' he said. 'In most lives I don't know you at all,' she countered, now staring straight at him. 'That's so sad.' 'I don't think so.' 'Really?' 'Really.' She smiled. 'We're special, Nora. We're chosen. No one understands us.' 'No one understands anyone. We're not chosen.' 'The only reason I am still in this life is because of you...' She lunged forward and kissed him.”

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“No. The Book of Regrets is getting lighter. There's a lot of white space in there now...It seems that you have spent all your life saying things that you aren't really thinking. This is one of your barriers.' 'Barriers?' 'Yes. You have a lot of them. They stop you from seeing the truth.' 'About what?' 'About yourself. And you really need to start trying. To see the truth. Because this matters.”

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“This isn't a magic lamp and I am no genie. There is no set number. It could be one. It could be a hundred. But you only have an infinite number of lives to choose from so long as the time in the Midnight Library stays, well, at midnight. Because while it stays at midnight, your life — your root life — is somewhere between life and death. If time moves here, that means something very...' She searched for a delicate word. '...decisive has happened. Something that razes the Midnight Library to the ground, and takes us with it. And so I would err on the side of caution. I would try to think very keenly about where you want to be. You have clearly made some progress. I can tell. You seem to realise that life could be worth living, if only you found the right one to exist inside. But you don't want that gate to close before you get a chance to go through it.”

Matt HaigThe Midnight Library
Book:Reasons to Stay Alive
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“When Nora thought of her closest access to happiness, it was music. Yes, she still played the piano and keyboard sometimes, but she had given up creating. She had given up singing. She thought of those happy early pub gigs playing 'Beautiful Sky'. She thought of her brother larking about on stage with her and Ravi and Ella. So now she knew precisely which book to ask for.”

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