852 Quotes by Matt Haig

Actually, depression can be exacerbated by things being all right externally, because the gulf between what you are feeling and what you are expected to feel becomes larger.

Don’t do the work people expect you to do. Do the work you want to do. You only get one life. It’s always best to live it as yourself.

Basically, the key rule is, if you want to appear sane on Earth you have to be in the right place, wearing the right clothes, saying the right things, and only stepping on the right kind of grass.

The object of art is to give life a shape,’ said Shakespeare. And my life –and my mess of a mind –needed shape. I had ‘lost the plot’. There was no linear narrative of me. There was just mess and chaos. So yes, I loved external narratives for the hope they offered. Films. TV dramas. And most of all, books. They were, in and of themselves, reasons to stay alive. Every book written is the product of a human mind in a particular state. Add all the books together and you get the end sum of humanity.

On Earth you have to spend a lot of time traveling in between places, be it on roads or on rail tracks or in careers or relationships.

She carried on talking. And as she did so, I realized there could be no cosmic consequence at all if I stopped listening, and with that realization I switched off the phone.

Be brave. Be strong. Breathe, and keep going. You will thank yourself later.

Read a book without thinking about finishing it. Just read it. Enjoy every word, sentence, and paragraph. Don’t wish for it to end, or for it to never end.

I understand that the way you stop time is by stopping being ruled by it. I am no longer drowning in my past, or fearful of my future. How can I be? The future is you.