The best quotes by the author we have brought to you
“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 worth-while.” (The Midnight Library Quotes)
Matt Haig
The Midnight Library
“And it was different because she no longer felt she was there simply to serve the dreams of other people. She no longer felt like she had to find sole fulfilment as some imaginary perfect daughter or sister or partner or wife or mother or employee or anything other than a human being, orbiting her own purpose, and answerable to herself.”
“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 for ever. And imagining there is just breeds more unhappiness in the life you’re in.”
Matt Haig
The Midnight Library
“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
“But it is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy.”
“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 second of every day we are entering a new universe. And we spend so much time wishing our lives were different, comparing ourselves to other people and to other versions of ourselves, when really most lives contain degrees of good and degrees of bad.”
Matt Haig
The Midnight Library
“Human beings when there’s enough of them together acting in total unison become something else.”
Matt Haig
The Midnight Library
“I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn’t.”
“I mean, it would have made things a lot easier if we understood there was no way of living that can immunise you against sadness. And that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness.”
“If you aim to be something you are not, you will always fail. Aim to be you. 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
“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.”
Matt Haig
The Midnight Library
“In chess, as in life, possibility is the basis of everything.”
“Librarians have knowledge. They guide you to the right books. The right words. They find the best places. Like soul-enhanced search engines.”
Matt Haig
The Midnight Library
“Life is frightening, and it is frightening for a reason, and the reason is that it doesn’t matter which branch of a life we get to live, we are always the same rotten tree. I wanted to be many things in my life. All kinds of things. But if your life is rotten, it will be rotten no matter what you do. The damp rots the whole useless thing.”
Matt Haig
The Midnight Library
“Maybe that’s what all lives were, though. Maybe even the most seemingly perfectly intense or worthwhile lives ultimately felt the same. Acres of disappointment and monotony and hurts and rivalries but with flashes of wonder and beauty. Maybe that was the only meaning that mattered. To be the world, witnessing itself.”
Matt Haig
The Midnight Library
“Never underestimate the big importance of small things.”
Matt Haig
The Midnight Library
“Regrets don’t leave. They weren’t mosquito bites. They itch forever.”
Matt Haig
The Midnight Library
“She didn’t want to die. And she didn’t want to live any other life than the one that was hers. The one that could be a messy struggle, but it was her messy struggle. A beautiful messy struggle.”
“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
“Sometimes just to say your own truth out loud is enough to find others like you.”
Matt Haig
The Midnight Library
“That was how she had felt most of her life. Caught in the middle. Struggling, flailing, just trying to survive while not knowing which way to go. Which path to commit to without regret.”
“The art of swimming was about purity. The more focused you were on the activity, the less focused you were on everything else. You kind of stopped being you and became the thing you were doing. ”
Matt Haig
The Midnight Library
“The lonely mind in the busy city yearns for connection because it thinks human-to-human connection is the point of everything. But amid pure nature…solitude took on a different character. It became in itself a kind of connection. A connection between herself and the world. And between her and herself.”
Matt Haig
The Midnight Library
“The only way to learn is to live”
Matt Haig
The Midnight Library
“The paradox of volcanoes was that they were symbols of destruction but also life. Once the lava slows and cools, it solidifies and then breaks down over time to become soil – rich, fertile soil. She wasn’t a black hole, she decided. She was a volcano. And like a volcano she couldn’t run away from herself. She’d have to stay there and tend to that wasteland. She could plant a forest inside herself.”
Matt Haig
The Midnight Library
“The regrets she had been living with most of her life were wasted ones.”
“The thing that looks the most ordinary might end up being the thing that leads you to victory.”
Matt Haig
The Midnight Library
“There was more to her than a flat line of mild to moderate depression, spiced up with occasional flourishes of despair. And that gave her hope, and even the sheer sentimental gratitude of being able to be here, knowing she had the potential to enjoy watching radiant skies and mediocre Ryan Bailey comedies and be happy listening to music and conversation and the beat of her own heart. And it was different because, above all other things, that heavy and painful Book of Regrets had been successfully burnt to dust.”
“True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing.’ – Socrates”
Matt Haig
The Midnight Library
“We just have to close our eyes and savour the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays. We are as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum. We only need to be one person. We only need to feel one existence. We don’t have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility.”
“We only know what we perceive. Everything we experience is ultimately just our perception of it. “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”
Matt Haig
The Midnight Library
“We only need to be one person. Only need to feel one existence. We don’t have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility.”
Matt Haig
The Midnight Library
“Well, that’s the beauty, isn’t it? You just never know how it ends.’ And Nora smiled as she stared at all the pieces she still had left in play, thinking about her next move.”
“‘Well, then, what is success?’ Nora had no idea what success was. She had felt like a failure for so long.”
“Will my life be miraculously free from pain, despair, grief, heartbreak, hardship, loneliness, depression? No. But do I want to live? Yes. Yes. A thousand times, yes.”
“You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it.”
Matt Haig
The Midnight Library
“You see, doing one thing differently is very often the same as doing everything differently.”
Matt Haig
The Midnight Library
