Matt Haig
Matt Haig is an English author and journalist. He has written both fiction and non-fiction books for children and adults, often in the speculative fiction genre. (Matt Haig Quotes)
“A book is a map… There will be times in your life when you will feel lost and confused. The way back to yourself is through reading. There is not a problem in existence that has not been eased, somewhere and at some time, by a book… The answers have all been written. And the more you read, the more you will know how to find your way through those difficult times.”
Matt Haig
Echo Boy
“A cow is a cow even if you call it beef.”
Matt Haig
The Humans
“A friend doesn’t care about the size of your house
Matt Haig
and that friend can be human, pixie or mouse.
A friend may be a rabbit, a friend may be an elf.
But a friend is a friend, if they like you for yourself.”
The Truth Pixie Goes to School
“A person was like a city. You couldn’t let a few less desirable parts put you off the whole. There may be bits you don’t like, a few dodgy side streets and suburbs, but the good stuff makes it worthwhile.”
Matt Haig
The Midnight Library
“A problem with living in the twenty-first century… We are made to feel poor on thirty thousand pounds a year. To feel poorly travelled if we have only been to ten other countries. To feel old if we have a wrinkle. To feel ugly if we aren’t photo shopped and filtered.”
Matt Haig
How to Stop Time
“A reminder for the tough times One day this will be over. And we will be grateful for life in ways we never felt possible before.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“A society which demands we be normal even as it drives us insane.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“A sore throat doesn’t become less sore simply because you’ve felt it before.”
Matt Haig
Notes on a Nervous Planet
“A true friend is rare
Matt Haig
a true friend is the best
a true friend is needed
like east needs west.”
The Truth Pixie Goes to School
“Advertising their bad diets with the most ill-advised attire.”
Matt Haig
The Possession of Mr Cave
“Aim not to get more stuff done. Aim to have less stuff to do. Be a work minimalist. Minimalism is about doing more with less. So much of working life seems to be about doing less with more. Activity isn’t always the same as achievement.”
Matt Haig
Notes on a Nervous Planet
“All a writer can do is provide a match, and hopefully a dry one. The reader has to strike the flame into being.”
Matt Haig
Notes on a Nervous Planet
“An annoying thing about depression is that thinking about life is inevitable. Depression makes thinkers out of all of us.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“An impossibility is just a possibility you don’t understand yet”
Matt Haig
A Boy Called Christmas
“And besides, libraries aren’t just about books. They are one of the few public spaces we have left which don’t like our wallets more than us.”
Matt Haig
Notes on a Nervous Planet
“And for three weeks I was trapped in my own mind again. But this time, I had weapons. One of them, maybe the most important, was this knowledge: I have been ill before, then well again. Wellness is possible.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“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. Every time I read a great book I felt I was reading a kind of map, a treasure map, and the treasure I was being directed to was in actual fact myself.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“And that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness. You can’t have one without the other. Of course, they come in different degrees and quantities. But there is no life where you can be in a state of sheer happiness forever. And imagining there is just breeds more unhappiness in the life you’re in.”
Matt Haig
The Midnight Library
“And then there were fish. And some of the fish thought long and hard and decided the sea was a bit limiting. It was okay, but there weren’t any bananas in the sea, and they were beginning to fancy a banana.”
Matt Haig
Humans
“And when a joke is powerful enough, you don’t laugh, you scream. Yes, when the mask slips you scream out loud for all the terror in the world, and I screamed then.”
Matt Haig
Echo Boy
“And yet we had done what so often happened in the proud history of geographic discovery. We had found paradise. And then we had set it on fire.”
Matt Haig
How to Stop Time
“Another strange thing was how absence had intensified my feelings for her. How I craved the sweet everyday reality of just being with her, of having a mundane conversation about how our days had been. The gentle but unbettered comfort of coexistence. I couldn’t think of a better purpose for the universe than for her to be in it.” (Matt Haig Quotes)
Matt Haig
The Humans
“Answer emails while I should be listening to my mum talk about her trip to see a doctor. Feel the empty joy of likes and favorites.”
Matt Haig
Notes on a Nervous Planet
“Anxiety takes away all the commas and full stops we need to make sense of ourselves.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“Artist A human who notices the ridiculousness of being a human and paints, writes, builds, sculpts, films, acts, plays, sings, cries about it.”
Matt Haig
Humans
“As the great writer Anne Lamott puts it: “Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island for boats to save; they just stand there shining.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“Back in Mother Ivy’s time I would have been obliged to cook you gingerbread and show you my spickle dancing, and yet now I have permission to chop you up into little pieces. I cry myself to sleep every night, and feel dead inside, but society is definitely improving.”
Matt Haig
A Boy Called Christmas
“Be a mystery, not a demographic. Be someone a computer could never quite know.”
Matt Haig
Notes on a Nervous Planet
“Be depressed on Mondays and happy on Saturdays. Not the other way round. It will annoy people.”
Matt Haig
Humans
“Be humble because you are made of earth. Be noble, for you are made of stars.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“Be the complex elegance of a melting candle. Be a map with 10,000 roads. Be the orange at sunset that outclasses the pink of sunrise. Be the self that dares to be true.”
Matt Haig
Notes on a Nervous Planet
“Because the possibility of pain is where love stems from.”
Matt Haig
The Humans
“Because words are a magic too, and they can contain everything.”
Matt Haig
The Girl Who Saved Christmas
“Because words are magic too. They can contain the whole world.”
Matt Haig
Father Christmas and Me
“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… Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?”
Matt Haig
The Midnight Library
“Beware of the gap. The gap between where you are and where you want to be. Simply thinking of the gap widens it. And you end up falling through.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“Blood doesn’t satisfy cravings. It magnifies them.”
Matt Haig
The Radleys
“Books are trees that dream.”
Matt Haig
Father Christmas and Me
“But if everyone was made to look perfect, then no one would be special because being special meant being different, by offering something that wasn’t on offer elsewhere.”
Matt Haig
Echo Boy
“But it is sometimes more fun to explore than to know. And you might find that you love the voyage in all its stumbling uncertainty.”
Matt Haig
Humans
“But it only takes a doubt. A drop of ink falls into a clear glass of water and clouds the whole thing. So the moment after I realised I wasn’t perfectly well was the moment I realised I was still very ill indeed.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“But stories aren’t always lies. They are things stored in all our imaginations-hence the name stories-and it is the author’s job to point them out.”
Matt Haig
To Be a Cat
“But there’s some salad in the fridge if you get hungry.’ Salad?! On his birthday!”
Matt Haig
To Be a Cat
“But this is how I remember these things, and all we can ever be is faithful to our memories of reality, rather than the reality itself, which is something closely related but never precisely the same thing.”
Matt Haig
How to Stop Time
“But you’ll know when you find yourself, because then you will stop ageing.”
Matt Haig
A Boy Called Christmas
“By thinking of the cloud, I thirsted for the raindrop.”
Matt Haig
The Humans
“Check your emotional armour is actually protecting you, and not so heavy you can’t move.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“Christianity The human’s most popular religion, partly because it gave its followers stories about people who had babies without sex, and who died without dying. It also made sure, via the bible, that there were enough possible interpretations to satisfy every human belief and prejudice.”
Matt Haig
Humans
“Cities try to shame us into action, as they know stillness is the preserve of the destitute, the dangerous, the dead.” (Matt Haig Quotes)
Matt Haig
The Possession of Mr Cave
“Compassion is the basis of morality,’ the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer had written, in one of his softer moments. Maybe it was the basis of life too.”
Matt Haig
The Midnight Library
“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.”
Matt Haig
The Radleys
“Continually looking for the meaning of life is like looking for the meaning of toast. It is sometimes better just to eat the toast.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“Curiosity and passion are the enemies of anxiety. Even when I fell into anxiety, if I get curious enough about something outside of me it can help pull me out. Music, art, film, nature, conversation, words. Find passion as large as your fear. The way out of your mind is via the world.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“Dads are just men who have babies but I know he loved me because I felt it go out of me when he crashed. It was like air or blood or bones or something that made me and it wasn’t there anymore and I had only half of it now and I didn’t know if that was enough.”
Matt Haig
The Dead Fathers Club
“Depression is also smaller than you. Always, it is smaller than you, even when it feels vast. It operates within you, you do not operate within it. It may be a dark cloud passing across the sky but – if that is the metaphor – you are the sky. You were there before it. And the cloud can’t exist without the sky, but the sky can exist without the cloud.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“Do you know how magic works? The kind of magic that gets reindeer to fly in the sky? The kind that helps Father Christmas travel around the world in a single night? The kind that can stop time and make dreams come true? Hope. That’s how. Without hope, there would be no magic.”
Matt Haig
The Girl Who Saved Christmas
“Dogs are geniuses of loyalty. And that is a good kind of genius to have.”
Matt Haig
The Humans
“Don’t absorb criticism from people you wouldn’t go to for advice.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“Don’t be a perfectionist. Humans are imperfect. Human work is imperfect. Be less robot, more human. Be more imperfect. Evolution happens through mistakes.”
Matt Haig
Notes on a Nervous Planet
“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.”
Matt Haig
Notes on a Nervous Planet
“Don’t say yes to things you wish you had the confidence to say no to.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“Don’t compare your actual self to a hypothetical self. Don’t drown in a sea of ‘what ifs’. Don’t clutter your mind by imagining other versions of you, in parallel universes where you made different decisions.”
Matt Haig
Notes on a Nervous Planet
“Don’t ever be afraid of telling someone you love them. There are things wrong with your world, but an excess of love is not one.”
Matt Haig
The Humans
“Each of us has the power to enter a new world. All we have to do is change our mind.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“Energy rightly applied and directed will accomplish anything.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“Every life contains many millions of decisions. Some big, some small. But every time one decision is taken over another, the outcomes differ. An irreversible variation occurs, which in turn leads to further variations”
Matt Haig
The Midnight Library
“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.”
Matt Haig
How to Stop Time
“Everyone is a comedy. If people are laughing at you, they just don’t quite understand the joke that is themselves.”
Matt Haig
The Humans
“Everyone knew that the way to make something even lovelier was to put it in a pie.”
Matt Haig
A Boy Called Christmas
“Everyone represses everything. Do you think any of these “normal” human beings really do exactly what they want to do all the time? ‘Course not. It’s just the same. We’re middle-class and we’re British. Repression is in our veins.”
Matt Haig
The Radleys
“Everything in human life was a test. That was why they all looked so stressed out.”
Matt Haig
The Humans
“Everything in life is uncertain. That is how you know you are existing in the world, the uncertainty. Of course, this is why we sometimes want to return to the past, because we know it, or think we do. It’s a song we’ve heard.”
Matt Haig
How to Stop Time
“Everything is going to be all right. Or, if not, everything is going to be, so let’s not worry.”
Matt Haig
How to Stop Time
“Evolution happens through mistakes.”
Matt Haig
Notes on a Nervous Planet
“External events are neutral. They only gain positive or negative value the moment they enter our minds. It is ultimately up to us how we greet these things. It’s not always easy, sure, but there is a comfort in knowing it is possible to view any single thing in multiple ways. It also empowers us, because we aren’t at the mercy of the world we can never control, we are at the mercy of a mind we can, potentially, with effort and determination, begin to alter and expand. Our mind might make prisons, but it also gives us keys.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“Fear was when you wandered into a cellar and worried that the door would close shut. Despair was when the door closed and locked behind you.”
Matt Haig
The Midnight Library
“Fiction felt not like an escape from truth, but a release into it.”
Matt Haig
Notes on a Nervous Planet
“Find a good book. And sit down and read it. There will be times in your life when you’ll feel lost and confused. The way back to yourself is through reading. I want you to remember that. The more you read, the more you will know how to find your way through those difficult times.” (Matt Haig Quotes)
Matt Haig
Notes on a Nervous Planet
“Find the hope that is already here and help it grow.”
Matt Haig
Notes on a Nervous Planet
“For years now I had convinced myself that the sadness of the memories weighed more and lasted longer than the moments of happiness themselves. So I had, through some crude emotional mathematics, decided it was better not to seek out love or companionship or even friendship.”
Matt Haig
How to Stop Time
“Forgiving other people is great practice for forgiving yourself when the time comes.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“From the outside a person sees your physical form, sees that you are a unified mass of atoms and cells. Yet inside you feel like a Big Bang has happened. You feel lost, disintegrated, spread across the universe amid infinite dark space.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“Happiness is not good for the economy. We are encouraged, continually, to be a little bit dissatisfied with ourselves.”
Matt Haig
Notes on a Nervous Planet
“Hate is a pointless emotion to have inside you. It is like eating a scorpion to punish it for stinging you.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“Hope isn’t the same thing as happiness. You don’t need to be happy to be hopeful. You need instead to accept the unknowability of the future, and that there are versions of that future which could be better than the present. Hope, in its simplest form, is the acceptance of possibility.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“How to stop time: kiss.
Matt Haig
How to travel in time: read.
How to escape time: music.
How to feel time: write.
How to release time: breathe.”
Reasons to Stay Alive
“However, when humans forget to breathe they also forget they are alive, and this is dangerous. It can lead to a loss of perspective, and a focus on things like mortgages, professional rivalry, the car they should be driving, and whether there is a need to refurbish the kitchen”
Matt Haig
Humans
“Humans, as a rule, don’t like mad people unless they are good at painting, and only then once they are dead. But the definition of mad, on Earth, seems to be very unclear and inconsistent. What is perfectly sane in one era turns out to be insane in another. The earliest humans walked around naked with no problem. Certain humans, in humid rainforests mainly, still do so. So, we must conclude that madness is sometimes a question of time, and sometimes of postcode. 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.”
Matt Haig
The Humans
“I am you and you are me. We are alone, but not alone. We are trapped by time, but also infinite. Made of flesh, but also stars.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“I didn’t go too far before I saw her. She was walking on the other side of the street and she didn’t see me. It was strange, the significance of that moment for me and the insignificance of it for her. But then I reminded myself that when galaxies collide, they pass right through.”
Matt Haig
The Humans
“I do like you,’ said Miika, in his quiet mouse language, ‘even though you are not a dairy product.”
Matt Haig
A Boy Called Christmas
“I don’t know why people say sorry when they haven’t done the thing they are saying sorry for. It is like everyone in the world is a little bit to blame for everything.”
Matt Haig
The Dead Fathers Club
“I drink some water and eat some cereal and then I take Abraham for a walk. He had spent the night eating the arm of the sofa but I don’t want to judge him. He has enough issues already.”
Matt Haig
How to Stop Time
“I feel we need to stop seeing mental and physical health as either/or and more as a both/and situation. There is no difference. We are mental. We are physical. We are not split up into unrelated sections. We are not an existential department store. We are everything at once.”
Matt Haig
Notes on a Nervous Planet
“I felt the beautiful melancholy of being human, captured perfectly in the setting of a sun. Because, as with a sunset, to be human was to be in-between things; a day, bursting with desperate colour as it headed irreversibly towards night.”
Matt Haig
The Humans
“I have been so many different people, played so many different roles in my life. I am not a person. I am a crowd in one body. I was people I hated and people I admired. I was exciting and boring and happy and infinitely sad.”
Matt Haig
How to Stop Time
“I have learned that however strong the craving gets the guilt afterwards will be stronger.”
Matt Haig
Notes on a Nervous Planet
“I have long convinced myself that the piano is like a drug, seductive and strong, and it can mess you up, it can awaken dead emotions, it can drown you in your lost selves. It is a nervous breakdown waiting to happen.”
Matt Haig
How to Stop Time
“I looked at the transparent yellow liquid in the glass. I tasted it and tasted fermentation. In other words I tasted life on Earth. For everything that lives here ferments, ages, becomes diseased. But as things made their decline from ripeness they could taste wonderful, I realised”
Matt Haig
The Humans
“I sometimes feel like my head is a computer with too many windows open.”
Matt Haig
Notes on a Nervous Planet
“I think that basically we are all helping people. All the time. Every time any of us speaks openly about mental health, we are helping normalize an illness that is still handled with protective goggles and safety gloves.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“I used to worry about fitting in until I realized the reason I didn’t fit in was because I didn’t want to.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“I want life. I want to read it and write it and feel it and live it. I want, for as much of the time as possible in this blink-of-an-eye existence we have, to feel all that can be felt.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“I wanted to be dead. No. That’s not quite right. I didn’t want to be dead, I just didn’t want to be alive.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“I was already feeling a kind of homesickness for a present I was still living”
Matt Haig
How to Stop Time
“I was drinking a cup of tea. I actually enjoyed tea. It was so much better than coffee. It tasted like comfort.”
Matt Haig
The Humans
“If people pick on you, they see something inside you that they are scared of. Something special, which they might not have, which shines out of you like a jewel.”
Matt Haig
To Be a Cat
“If someone loves you, let them. Believe in that love. Live for them, even when you feel there is no point.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“If we demand the future be free from suffering in order to be happy, we can’t be happy. It is like demanding the sea be entirely still before we sail on it.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“If we keep going in a straight line we’ll get out of here. Walking one foot in front of the other, in the same direction, will always get you further than running around in circles. It’s about the determination to keep walking forward.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“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.”
Matt Haig
The Midnight Library
“If you are the type of person who thinks too much about stuff then there is nothing lonelier in the world than being surrounded by a load of people on a different wavelength.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“If you ever are on Earth and want whatever you are doing to end, look for the button with the red symbol on it.”
Matt Haig
Humans
“If you have children and love one more than another, work at it. They will know, even if it’s by a single atom less. A single atom is all you need to make a very big explosion.”
Matt Haig
The Humans
“If you have ever believed a depressive wants to be happy, you are wrong. They could not care less about the luxury of happiness. They just want to feel an absence of pain.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“If you see magic often enough it starts to look normal.”
Matt Haig
To Be a Cat
“If you think something is ugly, look harder. Ugliness is just a failure of seeing.”
Matt Haig
The Humans
“Imagine all the time we had was bottled up, like wine. and handed over to us. How would we make that bottle last? By sipping slowly, appreciating the taste, or by gulping?” (Matt Haig Quotes)
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“Imagine yourself as a baby. You would look at that baby and think they lacked nothing. 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 a human life.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“In a thousand years, if humans survive that long, everything you know will have been disproved. And replaced by even bigger myths.”
Matt Haig
The Humans
“In order to get over a problem it helps to look at it. You can’t climb a mountain that you pretend isn’t there.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“It fascinated me how depression and anxiety overlap with post-traumatic stress disorder. Had we been through some trauma we didn’t know about? Was the noise and speed of modern life the trauma for our caveman brains? Was I that soft? Or was life a kind of war most people didn’t see?”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“It is another unsolved mystery in a world full of unsolved mysteries. Now stand up and walk out the way you came, and the moment that fresh air caresses your face, you will realize that that is what makes the world so beautiful. All those unsolved mysteries. And you won’t ever want to interfere with that beauty again.”
Matt Haig
The Radleys
“It is better to be a sad poem than a blank page.”
Matt Haig
Echo Boy
“It is easier to learn to be soaked and happy than to learn how to stop the rain.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“It is impossible to grow in a world without struggle.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“It is strange how close the past is, even when you imagine it to be so far away. Strange how it can just jump out of a sentence and hit you. Strange how every object or word can house a ghost.”
Matt Haig
How to Stop Time
“It is the contemplation of absurd odds. We are all inside a dream that is real. We are the fires conjured from nothing. We exist out of near impossibility. And yet we exist.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“It made me lonely. And when I say lonely, I mean the kind of loneliness that howls through you like a desert wind. It wasn’t just the loss of people I had known but also the loss of myself. The loss of who I had been when I had been with them.”
Matt Haig
How to Stop Time
“It may seem strange, falling in love with someone because of a gesture, but sometimes you can read an entire person in a single moment. The way you can study a grain of sand and understand the universe. Love at first sight might or might not be a thing, but love in a single moment is.”
Matt Haig
How to Stop Time
“It sometimes feels as if we have temporarily solved the problem of scarcity and replaced it with the problem of excess.”
Matt Haig
Notes on a Nervous Planet
“It was a scene from before civilisation, or after it, beyond the apocalypse. A ceremony of victory, or initiation, or sacrifice.”
Matt Haig
The Possession of Mr Cave
“It was interesting, she mused to herself, how life sometimes simply gave you a whole new perspective by waiting around long enough for you to see it.”
Matt Haig
The Midnight Library
“It was, of course, another test. Everything in human life was a test. That was why they all looked so stressed out.”
Matt Haig
The Humans
“It wasn’t just the loss of people I had known but also the loss of myself. The loss of who I had been when I had been with them.”
Matt Haig
How to Stop Time
“It’s okay to be the teacup with a chip in it. That’s the one with a story.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“Just because you can, it doesn’t mean you should. There is a power and a beauty in unproved conjectures, unkissed lips and unpicked flowers.”
Matt Haig
The Humans
“Just when you feel you have no time to relax, know that this is the moment you most need to make time to relax.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“Kindness is a boomerang. You throw it out and you get it back. You had done kind things in the world, and you had been rewarded with kindness in return.”
Matt Haig
Evie and the Animals
“Knowledge is finite. Wonder is infinite.”
Matt Haig
The Humans
“Language gives us the power to voice our experience, to reconnect with the world, and to change our own and other people’s lives.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“Life can sometimes feel like an overproduced song, with a cacophony of a hundred instruments playing all at once. Sometimes the song sounds better stripped back to just a guitar and a voice. Sometimes, when a song has too much happening, it’s hard to hear the song at all.”
Matt Haig
Notes on a Nervous Planet
“Life is like a chimney – you sometimes have to get through the dark before you see the light.”
Matt Haig
The Girl Who Saved Christmas
“Life is so infinitely hard. It involves a thousand tasks all at once. And I am a thousand different people, all fleeing away from the centre.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“Life is waiting for you. You might be stuck here for a while, but the world isn’t going anywhere. Hang on in there if you can. Life is always worth it.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“Life wasn’t ever one ingredient. It was several. And some flavors were bad and some were good, but love was the strongest of all. If you were loved, you had everything.”
Matt Haig
To Be a Cat
“Like when a shark pops out of an ocean to gobble a fisherman.” (Matt Haig Quotes)
Matt Haig
To Be a Cat
“Living with anxiety, turning up, and doing stuff with anxiety takes a strength most people will never know.”
Matt Haig
Notes on a Nervous Planet
“Loneliness isn’t an absence of company. Loneliness is felt when we are lost. But we can be lost right in the middle of a crowd. There is nothing lonelier than being with people who aren’t on your wavelength. The cure for loneliness isn’t more people. The cure for loneliness is understanding who we are.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“Look, for God’s sake. Look at everyone. Everyone represses everything. Do you think any of these ‘normal’ human beings really do exactly what they want to do all the time? ’Course not. It’s just the same. We’re middle-class and we’re British. Repression is in our veins.”
Matt Haig
The Radleys
“Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies.”
Matt Haig
The Midnight Library
“Love was a way to live forever in a single moment, and it was also a way to see yourself as you had never actually seen yourself, and made you realise – having done so – that this view was a more meaningful one than any of your previous self-perceptions and self-deceptions.”
Matt Haig
The Humans
“Magazines are colourful, glossy print-based tools designed to fuel a sense of inadequacy within the reader. The aim of a magazine publisher being to make people feel too poor, fat, old, single, unhealthy, unfamous, ill informed, badly dressed, anxious, undersexed and generally depressed, while at the same time acting like they are solving these problems.”
Matt Haig
Humans
“Make sure, as often as possible, you are doing something you’d be happy to die doing.”
Matt Haig
The Humans
“Maybe love is just about finding the person you can be your weird self with.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“Maybe once you had known fear and love and beauty, you could never unknow them.”
Matt Haig
Echo Boy
“Maybe the point of life is to give up certainty and to embrace life’s beautiful uncertainty.”
Matt Haig
Notes on a Nervous Planet
“Memories were just future sadness stored away”
Matt Haig
Echo Boy
“Mental health is intricately related to the whole body. And the whole body is intricately related to mental health. You can’t draw a line between a body and a mind any more than you can draw a line between oceans.”
Matt Haig
Notes on a Nervous Planet
“Most people grow up gradually, over many years, but standing there in the still forest, Nikolas lost his childhood in a second. Nothing makes you grow up quicker than discovering your father is not the man you think he is.”
Matt Haig
A Boy Called Christmas
“Music doesn’t get in. Music is already in. Music simply uncovers what is there, makes you feel emotions that you didn’t necessarily know you had inside you, and runs around waking them all up. A rebirth of sorts.”
Matt Haig
How to Stop Time
“Never be cool. Never try to be cool. Never worry what the cool people think. Head for the warm people. Life is warmth. You’ll be cool when you’re dead.”
Matt Haig
Notes on a Nervous Planet
“Never underestimate the big importance of small things”
Matt Haig
The Midnight Library
“New technology, on Earth, just means something you will laugh at in five years. Value the stuff you won’t laugh at in five years. Like love. Or a good poem. Or a song. Or the sky.”
Matt Haig
The Humans
“No one can make you feel bad about yourself without your consent.’ Which meant that you can’t control what people said about you, but you can control how you feel about what they said.”
Matt Haig
To Be a Cat
“No one is ever completely right about anything. Anywhere.”
Matt Haig
The Humans
“No one will understand you. It is not, ultimately, that important. What is important is that you understand you.”
Matt Haig
The Humans
“No physical appearance is worth not eating pasta for.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“No two moralities match. Accept different shapes, so long as they aren’t sharp enough to hurt.”
Matt Haig
The Humans
“No, she felt homesick, not for a place, but for a time. Maybe it wasn’t homesickness at all. Maybe it was timesickness. She just missed those days when she was younger – seven, six, five, four years old – when she didn’t know so much about the world. She missed, most of all, her mother.”
Matt Haig
The Girl Who Saved Christmas
“Nora wanted to live in a world where no cruelty existed, but the only worlds she had available to her were worlds with humans in them.”
Matt Haig
The Midnight Library
“Nothing fixes a thing so firmly in the memory as the wish to forget it.”(Matt Haig Quotes)
Matt Haig
How to Stop Time
“Nothing is stronger than a small hope that doesn’t give up.
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“On Earth, social networking generally involves sitting down at a non-sentient computer and typing about needing a coffee and reading about other people needing a coffee, while forgetting to actually make a coffee.”
Matt Haig
Humans
“Once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“One cliché attached to bookish people is that they are lonely, but for me books were my way out of being lonely. If you are the type of person who thinks too much about stuff then there is nothing lonelier in the world than being surrounded by a load of people on a different wavelength.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“One frustration with anxiety is that it is often hard to find a reason behind it. There may be no visible threat and yet you can feel utterly terrorized.”
Matt Haig
Notes on a Nervous Planet
“Open your mind, this is only a song, But the way to be happy is to admit you were wrong.”
Matt Haig
Echo Boy
“Or maybe, just maybe, he’d got close enough to sense the melancholy that sits at the core of her, usually hidden deep behind a superficial mask of cheerful sarcasm.”
Matt Haig
The Radleys
“People are craving not just physical space but the space to be mentally free. A space from unwanted distracted thoughts that clutter our heads like pop-up advertising of the mind in an already frantic world. And that space is still there to be found. It’s just that we can’t rely on it. We have to consciously seek it out.”
Matt Haig
Notes on a Nervous Planet
“People place so much value on thought, but feeling is as essential. I want to read books that make me laugh and cry and fear and hope and punch the air in triumph. I want a book to hug me or grab me by the scruff of my neck. I don’t even mind if it punches me in the gut. Because we are here to feel.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“People say that humans are the superior species on this planet because we have minds that are conscious of their own existence, and therefore we have the capacity to create a culture, to create an art. I look at sheep, at peace on the moors, and wonder exactly how much of a delusion are our arrogant souls prepared to share?”
Matt Haig
The Possession of Mr Cave
“People with mental illnesses aren’t wrapped up in themselves because they are intrinsically any more selfish than other people. Of course not. They are just feeling things that can’t be ignored. Things that point the arrows inward.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“People you love never die. That is what Omai had said, all those years ago. And he was right. They don’t die. Not completely. They live in your mind, the way they always lived inside you. You keep their light alive. If you remember them well enough, they can still guide you, like the shine of long-extinguished stars could guide ships in unfamiliar waters.”
Matt Haig
How to Stop Time
“Perhaps a wish was just a hope with better aim.”
Matt Haig
A Boy Called Christmas
“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”
Matt Haig
Echo Boy
“Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything it is because we are dangerously near to wanting nothing.’ —Sylvia Plath”
Matt Haig
Notes on a Nervous Planet
“Politeness is often fear. Kindness is always courage. But caring is what makes you human. Care more, become more human.”
Matt Haig
The Humans
“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.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“Reading isn’t important because it helps to get you a job. It’s important because it gives you room to exist beyond the reality you’re given. It is how humans merge. How minds connect. Dreams. Empathy. Understanding. Escape. Reading is love in action.”
Matt Haig
Notes on a Nervous Planet
“Regrets don’t leave. They weren’t mosquito bites. They itch forever.”
Matt Haig
The Midnight Library
“Remember no one really cares what you look like. They care what they look like. You are the only person in the world to have worried about your face.”
Matt Haig
Notes on a Nervous Planet
“Room Imagine forgiving yourself completely. The goals you didn’t reach. The mistakes you made. Instead of locking those flaws inside to define and repeat yourself, imagine letting your past float through your present and away like air through a window, freshening a room. Imagine that.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“She gave me peace just by looking at her, which might explain why I looked at her for too long, and with too much intensity in my eyes. The way people never look at people anymore. I wanted her in every sense.”
Matt Haig
How to Stop Time
“She laughs. It is the simplest, purest joy on earth, I realise, to make someone you care about laugh.”
Matt Haig
How to Stop Time
“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.”
Matt Haig
The Midnight Library
“She understands enough of what is going on. She understands that he wants to save her, more than anything in the world. She understands what he understands, that if only he could save her, he could save himself. She understands also that she loves him, and as she stays inside his helpless stare, she knows that fate is something she has to steer herself.”
Matt Haig
The Radleys
“Silence is pain. But it is a pain with an exit route. When we can’t speak, we can write. When we can’t write, we can read. When we can’t read, we can listen. Words are seeds. Language is a way back to life. And it is sometimes the most vital comfort we have.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“So every human inhabitant on this freak wonder of a planet shares the same core. I am you and you are me. We are alone, but not alone. We are trapped by time, but also infinite. Made of flesh, but also stars.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“So he knew terrible things- even the most terrible things-couldn’t stop the world from turning. Life went on. And he made a promise to himself that, when he grew older, he’d try to be like his mother. Colourful, and happy and kind and full of joy.”
Matt Haig
A Boy Called Christmas
“So heaven is life with the good bits taken out, and with an all-white backdrop.”
Matt Haig
Humans
“So long as there are still books on the shelves, you are never trapped. Every book is a potential escape.”
Matt Haig
The Midnight Library
“So most of what we know now will be disproved or reassessed in the future. That is how science works, not through blind faith, but continual doubt.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“Sometimes just to say your own truth out loud is enough to find others like you.” (Matt Haig Quotes)
Matt Haig
The Midnight Library
“Sometimes regrets aren’t based on fact at all”
Matt Haig
The Midnight Library
“Sometimes things are a change for the better and the worse at the same time, like the internet. Or the electric keyboard. Or pre-chopped garlic. Or the theory of relativity.”
Matt Haig
How to Stop Time
“Stigma is particularly cruel for depressives, because stigma affects thoughts and depression is a disease of thoughts.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“Technology won’t save humankind. Humans will.”
Matt Haig
The Humans
“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.”
Matt Haig
How to Stop Time
“That is what the taste of blood does. It takes away the gap between thought and action. To think is to do. There is no unlived life inside you as the air speeds past your body, as you look down at the dreary villages and market towns…”
Matt Haig
The Radleys
“That the prison wasn’t the place, but the perspective.”
Matt Haig
The Midnight Library
“That was the familiar lesson of time. Everything changes and nothing changes.”
Matt Haig
How to Stop Time
“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.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“That’s the thing with time, isn’t it? It’s not all the same. Some days – some years – some decades – are empty. There is nothing to them. It’s just flat water. And then you come across a year, or even a day, or an afternoon. And it is everything. It is the whole thing.”
Matt Haig
How to Stop Time
“The best of life exists beyond the things we are encouraged to crave.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“The best thing about rock bottom is the rock part. You discover the solid bit of you. The bit that can’t be broken down further. The thing that you might sentimentally call a soul. At our lowest we find the solid ground of our foundation. And we can build ourselves anew.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“The best way to think of the ageing process in relation to a human face is to imagine a map of an area of innocent land which slowly becomes a city with many long and winding routes.”
Matt Haig
The Humans
“The challenge is to find who we are amid the crowd of ourselves.”
Matt Haig
Notes on a Nervous Planet
“The craving for the thing is rarely met by the satisfaction of getting it. And so we crave more. And the cycle repeats. We are encouraged to want what will only make us want more. We are, in short, encouraged to be addicts.”
Matt Haig
Notes on a Nervous Planet
“The cure for loneliness is understanding who we are.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“The first rule of marriage: solve the mystery, end the love.”
Matt Haig
The Humans
“The hardest bit about losing people you loved wasn`t thinking about the memories you had, the ones that had already been made. No. The hardest bit was the stuff that should have been, but had now been denied.”
Matt Haig
Echo Boy
“The hardest question I have ever been asked is: ‘How do I stay alive for other people if I have no one?’ The answer is that you stay alive for other versions of you. For the people you will meet, yes, sure, but also the people you will be.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“The hardiest plant in the world is the purple saxifrage. It has delicate-looking flowers, with purple petals that seem as though they might blow away in the wind, yet it thrives in the Arctic. The flowers survive by clustering together, low to the ground, offering each other shelter against the hardest conditions on earth.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“The key is in accepting your thoughts, all of them, even the bad ones. Accept thoughts, but don’t become them. Understand, for instance, that having a sad thought, even having a continual succession of sad thoughts, is not the same as being a sad person. You can walk through a storm and feel the wind but you know you are not the wind.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“The main advantage of books over life is that they can be redrafted and redrafted, whereas life, alas, is always a first draft.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alivev(Matt Haig Quotes)
“The moments of deepest pain in my life were also the moments I learned the most about myself.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“The more ‘success’ you get, the easier it is to be disappointed by not getting things. The only difference is that now no one feels sorry for you.”
Matt Haig
Notes on a Nervous Planet
“The most powerful moment in life is when you decide not to be scared anymore.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“The only fear of missing out that matters is the fear of missing out on yourself.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“The only way to learn is to live.”
Matt Haig
The Midnight Library
“The paradox of modern life is this: we have never been more connected and we have never been more alone.”
Matt Haig
Notes on a Nervous Planet
“The present is known. The future is unknown. The present is solid. The future is abstract. Ruining the present by worrying about the future is like burning your most treasured possession simply because you might one day lose other possessions that you don’t own yet.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“The price of imagination is pain.”
Matt Haig
Echo Boy
“The problem is not that the world is a mess, but that we expect it to be otherwise.”
Matt Haig
Notes on a Nervous Planet
“The single biggest act of bravery or madness anyone can do is the act of change.”
Matt Haig
The Humans
“The sky isn’t more beautiful if you have perfect skin. Music doesn’t sound more interesting if you have a six-pack. Dogs aren’t better company if you’re famous. P izza tastes good regardless of your job title. The best of life exists beyond the things we are encouraged to crave.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“The sky, like the sea, can anchor us. It says: hey, it’s okay, there is something bigger than your life that you are part of, and it’s – literally – cosmic.”
Matt Haig
Notes on a Nervous Planet
“The tea seemed to be making things better. It was a hot drink made of leaves, used in times of crisis as a means of restoring normality.”
Matt Haig
The Humans
“The thing that looks the most ordinary might end up being the thing that leads you to victory.”
Matt Haig
The Midnight Library
“The trouble is our lives are cluttered. The challenge is to find who we are amid the crowd of ourselves.” (Matt Haig Quotes)
Matt Haig
Notes on a Nervous Planet
“The trouble with ladders is they give you no room to move around. Just room to fall.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“The whole of consumerism is based on us wanting the next thing rather than the present thing we already have. This is an almost perfect recipe for unhappiness.”
Matt Haig
Notes on a Nervous Planet
“The world exists in you. Your experience of the world isn’t this objective unchangeable thing called ‘The World’. No. Your experience of the world is your interaction with it, your interpretation of it. To a certain degree we all make our own worlds. We read it in our own way. But also: we can, to a degree, choose what to read. We have to work out what about the world makes us feel sad or scared or confused or ill or calm or happy.”
Matt Haig
Notes on a Nervous Planet
“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.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“The world is real, but your world is subjective. Changing your perspective changes your planet.”
Matt Haig
Notes on a Nervous Planet
“There are billions of different versions of an older you. There is one version of the present you.”
Matt Haig
Notes on a Nervous Planet
“There are only two things that are true 100 out of 100 times and that is that you live and also that you die and every other thing is not true or false it is a mix. It is both. It is none.”
Matt Haig
The Dead Fathers Club
“There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.’ Experience surrounds innocence and innocence can never be regained once lost.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“There is no shame in not watching news. There is no shame in not going on Twitter. There is no shame in disconnecting.”
Matt Haig
Notes on a Nervous Planet
“There is no standard normal. Normal is subjective. There are seven billion versions of normal on this planet.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“There is only one genre in fiction, the genre is called book.”
Matt Haig
The Humans
“There is this idea that you either read to escape or you read to find yourself.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“There is this idea that you either read to escape or you read to find yourself. I don’t really see the difference. We find ourselves through the process of escaping.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“There was no use trying to think of a way, because it was impossible. And the only way you could make something impossible real wasn’t through logic or sensible thinking. No. It was to believe it could be done.”
Matt Haig
A Boy Called Christmas
“There will be other days. And other feelings.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“There will be times in your life when you will feel lost and confused. The way back to yourself is through reading. There is not a problem in existence that has not been eased, somewhere and at some time, by a book. I want you to remember that. And the more you read, the more you will know how to find your way through those difficult times.”
Matt Haig
Echo Boy
“They talk some more, Will prompting Peter into remembering their early childhood on the barge. How their parents always went that extra mile to make their infancy special, like the time they brought a freshly killed department store Santa Clause home for their midnight Christmas feast.”
Matt Haig
The Radleys
“This is the whole stupid thing about all these unblood relationships. They depend on people staying the same, standing in the same spot they were in over a decade ago, when they first met. Surely the reality is that connections between people aren’t permanent, but fleeting and random, like a solar eclipse or clouds meeting in the sky. They exist in a constantly moving universe full of constantly moving objects.”
Matt Haig
The Radleys
“This was, I realized, a beautiful planet. Maybe it was the most beautiful of all. But beauty creates its own troubles. You look at a waterfall or an ocean or a sunset, and you find yourself wanting to share it with someone.”
Matt Haig
The Humans
“This was, I would later realise, a planet of things wrapped inside things. Food inside wrappers. Bodies inside clothes. Contempt inside smiles. Everything was hidden away.”
Matt Haig
The Humans
“Three in the morning is never the time to try and sort out your life.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“Time is not like pocket money that you can spend, because time is the person spending the pocket money and the pocket money is you”
Matt Haig
The Dead Fathers Club
“To be human was to continually dumb the world down into an understandable story that keeps things simple.”
Matt Haig
The Midnight Library
“To enjoy life, we might have to stop thinking about what we will never be able to read and watch and say and do, and start to think of how to enjoy the world within our boundaries. To live on a human scale. To focus on the few things we can do, rather than the millions of things we can’t. To not crave parallel lives. To find a smaller mathematics. To be a proud and singular one. An indivisible prime.”
Matt Haig
Notes on a Nervous Planet
“To experience beauty on Earth, you needed to experience pain and to know mortality. That is why so much that is beautiful on this planet has to do with time passing and the Earth turning. Which might also explain why to look at such natural beauty was to also feel sadness and a craving for a life unlived.”
Matt Haig
The Humans
“To know which path to take, it helps to take a few wrong ones.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“To lose someone you love is the very worst thing in the world. It creates an invisible hole that you feel you are falling down and will never end. People you love make the world real and solid and when they suddenly go away forever, nothing feels solid anymore.”
Matt Haig
A Boy Called Christmas
“To other people, it sometimes seems like nothing at all. You are walking around with your head on fire and no one can see the flames.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“To see something, you have to believe in it. Really believe it. That’s the first elf rule. You can’t see something you don’t believe in. Now try your hardest and see if you can see what you have been looking for.”
Matt Haig
A Boy Called Christmas
“To see the act of learning as something not for its own sake but because of what it will get you reduces the wonder of humanity. We are thinking, feeling, art-making, knowledge-hungry, marvellous animals, who understand ourselves and our world through the act of learning. It is an end in itself. It has far more to offer than the things it lets us write on application forms. It is a way to love living right now.”
Matt Haig
Notes on a Nervous Planet
“To talk about memories is to live them a little.”
Matt Haig
How to Stop Time
“To teach feels like you are a guardian of time itself, protecting the future happiness of the world via the minds that are yet to shape it.”
Matt Haig
How to Stop Time
“Tragedy is just comedy that hasn’t come to fruition. One day we will laugh at this. We will laugh at everything.” (Matt Haig Quotes)
Matt Haig
The Humans
“Trouble doesn’t always have to be caused. It’s sometimes already there.”
Matt Haig
A Boy Called Christmas
“Truth is a straight line you sometimes need to curve, you should know that by now.”
Matt Haig
How to Stop Time
“Unlike a book or a film depression doesn’t have to be about something.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“Vampire? Such a provocative word, wrapped in too many clichés and girly novels.”
Matt Haig
The Radleys
“Walking one foot in front of the other, in the same direction, will always get you further than running around in circles. It’s about the determination to keep walking forward.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“We are all potential depressives, but that is never going to be all we are.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“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.”
Matt Haig
How to Stop Time
“We humans might have evolved too far. The price for being intelligent enough to be the first species to be fully aware of the cosmos might just be a capacity to feel a whole universe’s worth of darkness.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“We need to find out what is good for us, and leave the rest. We don’t need another world. Everything we need is here, if we give up thinking we need everything.”
Matt Haig
Notes on a Nervous Planet
“We never think about food more than when we are hungry and we never think about life rafts more than when we are thrown overboard.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“We often find ourselves wishing for more hours in the day, but that wouldn’t help anything. The problem, clearly, isn’t that we have a shortage of time. It’s more that we have an overload of everything else.”
Matt Haig
Notes on a Nervous Planet
“We were made from stardust, like everything in the universe, and we – each of us – carried a power inside us. A power that couldn’t be destroyed anymore than the universe could be destroyed.”
Matt Haig
Echo Boy
“What doesn’t kill you very often makes you weaker. What doesn’t kill you can leave you limping for the rest of your days. What doesn’t kill you can make you scared to leave your house, or even your bedroom, and have you trembling, or mumbling incoherently, or leaning with your head on a window pane, wishing you could return to the time before the thing that didn’t kill you.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“What you learn when you are ill, about what hurts, can then be applied to the better times, too. Pain is one hell of a teacher.”
Matt Haig
Notes on a Nervous Planet
“When anger trawls the internet, Looking for a hook; It’s time to disconnect, And go and read a book.”
Matt Haig
Notes on a Nervous Planet
“When looking at triggers for mental health problems, therapists often identify an intense change in someone’s life as a major factor.”
Matt Haig
Notes on a Nervous Planet
“When normality becomes madness, the only way to find sanity is by daring to be different.”
Matt Haig
Notes on a Nervous Planet
“When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“When things go dark, we can’t see what we have. That doesn’t mean that we don’t have those things. Those things remain, right in front of us. All we need is to light a candle, or ignite some hope, and we can see that what we thought was lost was merely hidden.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“When you are depressed you feel alone, and that no one is going through quite what you are going through. You are so scared of appearing in any way mad you internalise everything, and you are so scared that people will alienate you further you clam up and don’t speak about it, which is a shame, as speaking about it helps.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“When you write with a pen it is like writing with a part of yourself like it is another finger.”
Matt Haig
The Dead Fathers Club
“Whenever I see someone reading a book, especially if it is someone I don’t expect, I feel civilisation has become a little safer.”
Matt Haig
How to Stop Time
“Wherever you are, at any moment, try and find something beautiful. A face, a line out of a poem, the clouds out of a window, some graffiti, a wind farm. Beauty cleans the mind.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“While everything is uncertain, everything is hope.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“Words don’t capture, they release.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“Yoga A form of exercise based around stretching limbs, breathing slowly, and feeling superior.”
Matt Haig
Humans
“You always have a choice. Life is full of choices” (Matt Haig Quotes)
Matt Haig
The Dead Fathers Club
“You are no less or more of a man or a woman or a human for having depression than you would be for having cancer or cardiovascular disease or a car accident.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“You are the goal you don’t have to continually improve yourself to love yourself. Love is not something you deserve only if you reach a goal. The world is one of pressure but don’t let it squeeze your self-compassion. You were born worthy of love and you remain worthy of love. Be kind to yourself.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“You are walking around with your head on fire and no one can see the flames.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“You can be a depressive and be happy, just as you can be a sober alcoholic.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“You can have everything and feel nothing.”
Matt Haig
The Midnight Library
“You can’t change the past. You can’t change other people. You can change you though. You narrate this story. So start to write a new chapter.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“You couldn’t be a little bit human in the same way you couldn’t be a little bit in love. It was all or nothing. A drop was an ocean. And maybe being human wasn’t even down to DNA in the end. Maybe it was about the ability to love, when you knew love was irrational. Yeah, maybe being human was to make no sense.”
Matt Haig
Echo Boy
“You don’t have to continually improve yourself to love yourself. Love is not something you deserve only if you reach a goal. The world is one of pressure but don’t let it squeeze your self-compassion. You were born worthy of love and you remain worthy of love. Be kind to yourself.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it.”
Matt Haig
The Midnight Library
“You don’t need to deny the reality of the present in order to have hope, you just need to know the future is uncertain, and that life contains light as well as dark.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“You don’t punish anyone other than yourself by keeping hate inside you.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“You exist as long as life exists. Because the life you feel inside you is part of the same life force that exists in every living thing.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“You have survived everything you have been through, and you will survive this too. Stay for the person you will become. You are more than a bad day, or week, or month, or year, or even a decade. You are a future of multifarious possibility. You are another self at a point in future time looking back in gratitude that this lost and former you held on. Stay.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“You have the power to stop time. You do it by kissing. Or listening to music.”
Matt Haig
The Humans
“You reach a certain age – sometimes it’s fifteen, sometimes it’s forty-six — and you realize the cliche you have adopted for yourself isn’t working.”
Matt Haig
The Radleys
“You see, doing one thing differently is very often the same as doing everything differently.”
Matt Haig
The Midnight Library
“You stepped out of the changing rooms, wearing a look I can only describe as Harlot Caught in a Cyclone.”
Matt Haig
The Possession of Mr Cave
“You’re overthinking it.’ ‘I have anxiety. I have no other type of thinking available.”
Matt Haig
The Midnight Library
“Your mind is a galaxy. More dark than light. But the light makes it worthwhile. Which is to say, don’t kill yourself. Even when the darkness is total. Always know that life is not still. Time is space. You are moving through that galaxy. Wait for the stars.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“Your value has no because. You are the right quantity. You are a full cup. You are worth yourself, and that is always enough.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
“Your worth is you. Your worth is your presence. Your worth is right there. Your worth isn’t something you earn. Your worth isn’t something you buy. Your worth isn’t something you gain through status on popularity or stomach crunches or having a really chic kitchen. Your worth is your existence. You were born with worth, as all babies are, and that worth doesn’t disappear simply because you have grown a little older. You are a human, being.”
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
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