Matt Haig Quotes

“THE WORLD IS increasingly designed to depress us. Happiness isn’t very good for the economy. If we were happy with what we had, why would we need more? How do you sell an anti-ageing moisturiser? You make someone worry about ageing. How do you get people to vote for a political party? You make them worry about immigration. How do you get them to buy insurance? By making them worry about everything. How do you get them to have plastic surgery? By highlighting their physical flaws. How do you get them to watch a TV show? By making them worry about missing out. How do you get them to buy a new smartphone? By making them feel like they are being left behind. To be calm becomes a kind of revolutionary act. To be happy with your own non-upgraded existence. To be comfortable with our messy, human selves, would not be good for business.”

“I have anxiety. I have no other type of thinking available.”

“Doing one thing differently is often the same as doing everything differently.”

“I don’t think your problem was stage fright. Or wedding fright. I think your problem was life fright.”

″‘Want,’ she told her, in a measured tone, ‘is an interesting word. It means lack. Sometimes if we fill that lack with something else the original want disappears entirely.‘”

“According to science, you start off as coal and you end up as coal. Maybe that was the real-life lesson.”

“Never underestimate the big importance of small things.”

“Pressure makes us, though. You start off as coal and the pressure makes you a diamond.”

“The only way to learn is to live.”

“But you could be anything you want to be, Nora. Think of all that possibility. It’s exciting.”

“It’s never too late to pursue a dream.”

“If you aim to be something you are not, you will always fail. Aim to be you. Aim to look and act and think like you. Aim to be the truest version of you. Embrace that you-ness. Endorse it. Love it. Work hard at it. And don’t give a second thought when people mock it or ridicule it.”

“Most gossip is envy in disguise.”

“Regrets don’t leave. They weren’t mosquito bites. They itch for ever.”

“Between life and death there is a library, and within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices.”

“It is quite a revelation to discover that the place you wanted to escape to is the exact same place you escaped from. That the prison wasn’t the place, but the perspective.”

“She realised that you could be as honest as possible in life, but people only see the truth if it is close enough to their reality.”

“You were born worthy of love and you remain worthy of love. Be kind to yourself.”

“We stay precisely as alive and precisely as human as we were the day we were born. The only thing we need is to exist. And to hope.”

“If we keep going in a straight line, we’ll get out of here.”

“The pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”

“It is a strange paradox, that many of the clearest, most comforting life lessons are learned while we are at our lowest.”

“The theme is connection. We are all things. And we connect to all things. Human to human. Moment to moment. Pain to pleasure. Despair to hope.”

“That baby came complete. Their value was innate from their first breath. Their value did not depend on external things like wealth or appearance or politics or popularity. It was the infinite value of human life.”

“Nothing is stronger than a small hope that doesn’t give up.”

“It’s okay to wear the scars of experience.”

″...change is the nature of life. The reason to hope.”

“You are still here. And that is everything.”

“But it is helpful to remember that our perspective is our world. And our external circumstances don’t need to change in order for our perspective to change.”

“Self-forgiveness makes the world better. You don’t become a good person by believing you are a bad one.”

“You can’t climb a mountain that you pretend isn’t there.”

“But if you are one of those people who believe that some things are impossible, you should put this book down right away. Because this book is full of impossible things.”

“Can you believe there was a time when no one in the world knew about it? A time when he was just an ordinary boy called Nikolas, living in the middle of nowhere, or the middle of Finland, doing nothing with magic except believing in it?”

“I suppose what I am saying is that Nikolas was a boy who believed in happiness, the way he believed in elves and trolls and pixies, but he had never actually seen an elf or a troll or a pixie, and he hadn’t really seen proper happiness either.”

“Be the forest.”

“And sometimes believing is as good as knowing.”

“Nothing makes you grow up quicker than discovering your father is not the man you think he is.”

“An impossibility is just a possibility you don’t understand yet.”

″‘Life is pain,’ he said, sadly. ‘But it’s also magic, Papa.‘”