852 Quotes by Matt Haig

The only way to learn is to live.

You cannot know the future. You look at the news and it looks terrifying. But you can never be sure. That is the whole thing with the future. You don’t know. At some point you have to accept that you don’t know. You have to stop flicking ahead and just concentrate on the page you are on.

Feeling you have no time doesn’t mean you have no time. Feeling you are ugly doesn’t mean you are ugly. Feeling anxious doesn’t mean you need to be anxious. Feeling you haven’t achieved enough doesn’t mean you haven’t achieved enough. Feeling you lack things doesn’t make you less complete.

Maybe it wasn’t the lack of achievements that had made her and her brother’s parents unhappy, maybe it was the expectation to achieve in the first place. She had no idea about any of it, really. But on that boat she realised something. She had loved her parents more than she ever knew, and right then, she forgave them completely.

Reading Schopenhauer when you felt melancholy was like taking off your clothes when you felt cold, but a line of his came back to me.

Librarians have knowledge. They guide you to the right books. The right worlds. They find the best places. Like soul-enhanced search engines.

Which means they are born, they make some friends, eat a few meals, they get married or they don’t get married, have a child or two, or not, drink a few thousand glasses of wine, have sexual intercourse a few times, discover a lump somewhere, feel a bit of regret, wonder where all the time went, know they should have done it differently, realize they would have done it the same, and then they die.

Panic is there to help us. As it is for many other animals, panic is our mind and body telling us to do something. Fight or flight.

The possibility of pain is where love stems from.