852 Quotes by Matt Haig

As a black hole forms it creates an immense gamma-ray burst, blinding whole galaxies with light and destroying millions of worlds. You could disappear at any second. This one. Or this one. Or this one. Make sure, as often as possible, you are doing something you’d be happy to die doing.

We have the knowledge to realise we are just a mess of quanta and particles, like everything else is, and yet we keep trying to separate ourselves from the universe we live in, to give ourselves a meaning above that of a tree or a rock or a cat or a turtle.

You are walking around with your head on fire and no one can see the flames.

Confine your imagination. Do not lose yourself to dangerous daydreams. Do not sit and ponder and dwell on a life you are not living. Do something active. Exercise. Work harder. Answer your emails. Fill your diary with harmless social activities. By doing, we stop ourselves imagining. And imagining for us is a fast-moving car heading toward a cliff.

Tough love doesn’t work. Turns out that just good old ‘love’ is enough.

Willie Nelson once said that sometimes, you have to either write a song or you kick your foot through a window. The third option, I suppose, is that you write a book.

If, as Schopenhauer said, “we forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people,” then love – at its best – is a way to reclaim those lost parts of ourselves. That freedom we lost somewhere quite early in childhood. Maybe love is just about finding the person you can be your weird self with.

But as things stood, there weren’t even two fun days. They only had Saturdays, because Mondays were a little bit too close to Sundays for Sunday’s liking, as if Monday were a collapsed star in the week’s solar system, with an excessive gravitational pull.

To be calm becomes a kind of revolutionary act. To be happy with your own nonupgraded existence.