Matt Haig citations

“S'il y a une issue, une issue qui ne soit pas la mort elle-même, alors elle passe par les mots. Mais plutôt que de quitter totalement l'esprit, les mots nous aident à quitter UN esprit et nous donnent les outils pour en bâtir un autre, similaire mais meilleur, proche de l'ancien mais avec des fondations plus fermes, et souvent avec une meilleure vue.”

“Peut-être qu'au lieu de nous occuper d'améliorer notre technologie et de lentement nous transformer en cyborgs nous devrions nous demander comment améliorer notre capacité à gérer tous ces changements”

“Regardez le ciel. Pensez au cosmos. Cherchez la grandeur à chaque occasion, afin de voir votre propre petitesse.”

“J'ai lu, lu et lu avec une intensité que je n'avais jamais vraiment connue avant. Enfin, je m'étais toujours considéré comme une personne qui aimait les livres. Mais il y a une différence entre aimer les livres et en avoir besoin. J'avais BESOIN de livres. Ce n'était pas un produit de luxe pendant cette période de ma vie. C'était une substance hautement addictive. Je n'aurais pas hésité à m'endetter pour lire (et ça a été le cas). Je crois que j'ai lu plus de livres pendant ces six mois que pendant cinq années à l'université, et je suis certainement tombé plus profondément dans les mondes que font naître les pages.”

“Et surtout, les livres. Ils étaient, en eux même, une raison de rester en vie.”

“Chaque livre écrit est le produit d'un esprit humain dans une disposition particulière. Additionnez tous les livres, et vous obtenez la somme totale de l'humanité. Chaque fois que je lisais un bon livre, j'avais l'impression de lire une sorte de carte au trésor, et le trésor vers lequel elle me menait était en fait moi-même.”

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

“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.”

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

“How to stop time: kiss.
How to travel in time: read.
How to escape time: music.
How to feel time: write.
How to release time: breathe.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Don’t aim for perfection. Evolution, and life, only happen through mistakes.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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