Quotes by Matt Haig

This was the species whose main excuse for not doing something was if only I had more time. Perfectly valid until you realised they did have more time. Not eternity, granted, but they had tomorrow. And the day after tomorrow. And the day after the day after tomorrow. In fact I would have to write the day after thirty thousand times before a final tomorrow in order to illustrate the amount of time on a humans hands.

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 arent 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.

I have been in love only once in my life. I suppose that makes me a romantic, in a sense. The idea that you have one true love, that no one else will compare after they have gone. Its a sweet idea, but the reality is terror itself. To be faced with all those lonely years after. To exist when the point of you has gone.

There is only one genre in fiction, the genre is called book.

There is this idea that you either read to escape or you read to find yourself. I dont really see the difference. We find ourselves through the process of escaping.

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 any more.

Minds have their own weather systems. You are in a hurricane. Hurricanes run out of energy eventually. Hold on.

Human history is full of depressing things like colonization, disease, racism, sexism...inventions of things which they had no idea how to handle (the atomic bomb, the Internet, the semicolon)....And through it all there has always been some truly awful food.

The key to happiness - or that even more desired thing, calmness - lies not in always thinking happy thoughts. No. That is impossible. No mind on earth with any kind of intelligence could spend a lifetime enjoying only happy thoughts. They key is in accepting your thoughts, all of them, even the bad ones. Accept thoughts, but dont 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.

And after that, after the awkward shuffling away of that last thin layer of clothes, words retreated to the sounds they once were. We had sex. A happy entanglement of warm limbs and warmer love. A physical and psychological merging that conjured a kind of inner light, a bio-emotional phosphorescence, that was overwhelming in its gorgeousness. I wondered why they weren’t prouder of it. Of this magic. I wondered why, if they had to have flags, why they didn’t just opt for one with a picture of sex.

MINDS ARE UNIQUE. They go wrong in unique ways. My mind went wrong in a slightly different way to how other minds go wrong. Our experience overlaps with other peoples, but it is never exactly the same experience.

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 wasnt perfectly well was the moment I realised I was still very ill indeed.

What doesnt kill you very often makes you weaker. What doesnt kill you can leave you limping for the rest of your days. What doesnt 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 didnt kill you.

Forcing yourself to see the world through loves gaze can be healthy. Love is an attitude to life. It can save us.

That kind of monotony that running generates - the one soundtracked by heavy breathing and the steady rhythm of feet on pavements - became a kind of metaphor for depression.

One cliche attached to bookish people is that they are lonely, but for me books were my way out of being lonely.

The way out is never through yourself.

People with mental illnesses arent wrapped up in themselves because they are intrinsically any more selfish than other people. Of course not. They are just feeling things that cant be ignored. Things that point the arrows inward.

I didnt totally fit in. I kind of disintegrated around people and became what they wanted me to be. But paradoxically, I felt an intensity inside me all the time. I didnt know what it was, but it kept building, like water behind a dam. Later, when I was properly depressed and anxious, I saw the illness as an accumulation of all that thwarted intensity. A kind of breaking through. As though, if you find it hard enough to let your self be free, your self breaks in, flooding your mind in an attempt to drown all those failed half-versions of you.

It fascinated me how depression and anxiety overlap with post-traumatic stress disorder. Had we been through some trauma we didnt 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 didnt see?