852 Quotes by Matt Haig

It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn’t make and the work we didn’t do and the people we didn’t marry and the children we didn’t have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the kens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, as infinitum, until our time runs out.

…He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being man. Do you know what I think? I think you are finding yourself. You were lost. You didn’t even know who or what you were. You had no purpose. You were living in poverty. You were moping around, burning yourself to feel something. Now look. You have purpose.

Loneliness was a fundamental part of being a human in an essentially meaningless universe.

I mean, it would have made things a lot easier if we understood there was no way of living that can immunize you against sadness. And that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness. You can’t have one without the other. Of course, they come in different degrees and quantities. But there is no life where you can be in a state of sheer happiness forever. And imagining there is just breeds more unhappiness in the life you’re in.

Imagine yourself as a baby. You would look at that baby and think they lacked nothing. That baby came complete. Their value was innate from their first breath. Their value did not depend on external things like wealth or appearance or politics or popularity. It was the infinite value of a human life.

Books might be one way to recover some space. Stories. Fiction. When I was eleven, friendless, struggling to fit in at school, I read The outsiders and Rumble Fish and Tex by S.E. Hinton, and I suddenly had friends again. Her books were friends.. And the stories they inhabited could be places I could hide inside. And feel safe. In a world that can get too much, a world where we are running out of mind space, fictional worlds are essential. They can be an escape from reality.

Do you know how magic works? The kind of magic that gets reindeer to fly in the sky? The kind that helps Father Christmas travel around the world in a single night? The kind that can stop time and make dreams come true?Hope.That's how. Without hope, there would be no magic.

I should also say, in case it needs saying: I don't know for sure that the words I write were the words that were actually spoken. They probably weren't. But this is how I remember these things, and all we can ever be is faithful to our memories of reality, rather than the reality itself, which is something closely related but never precisely the same thing.

There is this idea that you either read to escape or you read to find yourself. I don't really see the difference. We find ourselves through the process of escaping... Rather than leave the mind entirely, words help us leave a mind, and give us the building blocks to build another one, similar but better, nearby to the old one but with firmer foundations, and very often a better view.