Matt Haig Quotes

“There is no standard normal. Normal is subjective. There are seven billion versions of normal on this planet.”

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

“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.”

“Three in the morning is never the time to try and sort out your life.”

“Just when you feel you have no time to relax, know that this is the moment you most need to make time to relax.”

“It was, of course, another test. Everything in human life was a test. That was why they all looked so stressed out.”

“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.”

“An annoying thing about depression is that thinking about life is inevitable. Depression makes thinkers out of all of us.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“If getting drunk was how people forgot they were mortal, then hangovers were how they remembered.”

“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 people's, but it is never exactly the same experience.”

“Everyone is a comedy. If people are laughing at you, they just don't quite understand the joke that is themselves.”

“Make sure, as often as possible, you are doing something you’d be happy to die doing.”

“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.”

“No one will understand you. It is not, ultimately, that important. What is important is that you understand you.”

“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.”

“A paradox: The things you don’t need to live—books, art, cinema, wine, and so on—are the things you need to live.”

“There is this idea that you either read to escape or you read to find yourself.”

“Knowledge is finite. Wonder is infinite.”

“If you think something is ugly, look harder. Ugliness is just a failure of seeing.”

“Advice for a human

86. To like something is to insult it. Love it or hate it. Be passionate. As civilisation advances, so does indifference. It is a disease. Immunize yourself with art. And love.”

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

“The single biggest act of bravery or madness anyone can do is the act of change.”

“You can be a depressive and be happy, just as you can be a sober alcoholic.”

“Laughter, along with madness, seemed to be the only way out, the emergency exit for humans.”

“Maybe that is what beauty was, for humans. Accidents, imperfections, placed inside a pretty pattern. Asymmetry. The defiance of mathematics.”

“To be a human is to state the obvious. Repeatedly. Over and over, until the end of time.”

“Beauty breeds beauty, truth triggers truth. The cure for writer's block is therefore to read.”

“The possibility of pain is where love stems from”

“Vampire? Such a provocative word, wrapped in too many clichés and girly novels.”

“As civilisation advances, so does indifference.”