Quotes by Matt Haig

If you took away all pain, if everyone lived forever, everything would be bland, flat and boring; there would be no reason for art, music, newspapers, love because we would all be in a mono state of happiness.

Parents can only do what they think is best, with the experience they have. The learning curve for every parent is that theres a limit to how much they can shield children from.

Id love for mental illness to be seen in the way that other horrible illnesses are. When people get cancer, very few parents will say, Oh I feel so bad for giving you so much unhealthy food over the years.

If you sell the film rights to your book, it doesnt mean there will be a film. I have sold the rights to five books and had zero films made. Take the money and be thankful.

Books should be right up there with exercise and diet as something that dont just entertain us but heal us. They tell us we are not alone and fix the pieces of us that can be shattered by reality. They are teachers, and they are friends, and we should never contemplate a world - or a life - without them.

We need, ultimately, to be able to view mental health with the same clear-headedness we show when talking about physical health.

There arent any fences to the imagination, and so there shouldnt be any for books.

“History was, is, a one-way street. You have to keep walking forwards, but you dont always need to look ahead. Sometimes you can just look around and be happy right where you are.”

“I pleaded with God, I asked and begged and bargained, but God did not bargain. God was stubborn and deaf and oblivious. And she died and I lived and a hole opened up, dark and bottomless, and I fell down and kept falling for centuries.”

“I sometimes want to stop time. I sometimes want, in a happy moment, for a church bell never to ring again. I want not to ever have to go to the market again. I want for the starlings to stop flying in the sky... But we are all at the mercy of time. We are all the strings, arent we?”

“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”

“I am afraid that is, as they say, impossible. Time moves forwards. We have the luxury of time but we still can’t reverse it. We can’t stop it. We are one-way traffic, just the same as all these mayflies.”

“Happy moments can turn into pain, given time.”

“In this life, she clearly had no taste. But since when did taste have anything to do with happiness.”

“Possibility is everything that has ever happened. The purpose of science is to find out where the limits of possibility end. When we have achieved that - and we shall - there will be no more magic, no more superstition, there will just be what is.”

“You are only limited by your imagination”

“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.”

“Maybe it wasn’t the lack of achievements that had made her and her brother’s parents unhappy, maybe it was the expectation to achieve in the first place.”

“Maybe Shakespeare was right. Maybe all the world was a stage. Maybe without the act everything would fall apart. The key to happiness wasnt being yourself, because what did that even mean? Everyone had many selves. No. The key to happiness is finding the lie that suits you best.”

“There are patterns to life . . . Rhythms. It is so easy, while trapped in just the one life, to imagine that times of sadness or tragedy or failure or fear are a result of that particular existence. That it is a by-product of living a certain way, rather than simply living. 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. 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.”