852 Quotes by Matt Haig

Sometimes change is for the better, and sometimes change isn’t for the better.

You can have everything and feel nothing.

What a gift it was to be normal! We’re all walking on these unseen tightropes when really we could slip at any second and come face to face with all the existential horrors that only lie dormant in our minds.

Suddenly it made me realize why religion was such a big thing around here. Because, yes, sure, God could not exist. But then neither could humans. So if they believed in themselves – the logic must go – why not believe in something that was only a fraction more unlikely?

There are things I have experienced I will never again be able to experience for the first time: love, a kiss, Tchaikovsky, a Tahitian sunset, jazz, a hot dog, a Bloody Mary. That is the nature of things. History was – is – a one-day street. You have to keep walking forwards. But you don’t always need to look ahead. Sometimes you can just look around and be happy right where you are.

Travel makes one modest” said Gustave Flaubert. “You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” Such a perspective can be liberating. Especially when you have an illness that may on one hand lower self-esteem but on the other intensifies the trivial.

The trouble is our lives are cluttered. The challenge is to find who we are amid the crowd of ourselves.

We are all so weird that, really, none of us are. There are seven billion versions of strange on this freak wonder of a planet. We are all part of that. All freaks. All wonderful.

That’s the odd thing about depression and anxiety. It acts like an intense fear of happiness, even as you yourself consciously want that happiness more than anything. So if it catches you smiling, even fake smiling, then – well, that stuff’s just not allowed and you know it, so here comes ten tons of counterbalance.