852 Quotes by Matt Haig

That is the biggest paradox, I think, about the modern world. We are all connected to each other but we often feel shut out. The increasing overload and complexity of modern life can be isolating.

You need to be uncomfortable. You need to hurt. As the Persian poet Rumi wrote in the twelfth century, “The wound is the place where the light enters you.

Anne Sexton knows the mind, Walt Whitman knows grass, but Emily Dickinson knows everything.

A society which demands we be normal even as it drives us insane.

That was the price of human civilization – to create it, they had to close down the door to their true selves. And so they are lost, that is how I understand it. And that is why they invented art: books, music, films, plays, painting, sculpture. They invented them as bridges back to themselves, back to who they are. But however close they get, they are forever removed.

This, I soon discovered, was a typical pub. The ‘pub’ was an invention of humans living in England, designed as compensation for the fact that they were humans living in England.

And thus the heart will break, yet brokenly live on. – Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.

And yet we had done what so often happened in the proud history of geographic discovery. We had found paradise. And then we had set it on fire.

Maybe the point of life is to give up certainty and to embrace life’s beautiful uncertainty.