Matt Haig Quotes

My mother was, in the tradition of parents, quite a complicated and contradictory human being. Moralistic but a devout lover of pleasure (food, music, the aesthetics of nature). Deeply religious but seemingly as comforted by singing a secular chanson as by prayer. A lover of the natural world who was visibly anxious every time she left the castle. Fragile, but also though and stubborn. I never knew how many of her oddities had sprung from grief and how many from her own inherent nature. "There is not one blade of grass, there is no colour in this world that is not intended to make us rejoice," my mother told me once, shortly after arriving in England.

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.
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There are patterns of 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 the particular existence. That it is a by-product of living a certain way, rather than simply living. I mean, it would have mad 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.

Don't worry about things you can't control.

Human life, I realized, got progressively worse as you got older, by the sound of things. You arrived, with baby feet and hands and infinite happiness, and then the happiness slowly evaporated as your feet and hands grew bigger. And then, from the teenage years onward, happiness was something you could lose your grip of, and once it started to slip, it gained mass. It was as if the knowledge that it could slip was the thing that made it more difficult to hold, no matter how big your feet and hands were.

She was the stars and the heavens and the oceans. There was nothing but that single fragment of time, and this bud of love we had planted inside it. And then, at some point after it started, the kiss ended, and I stroked her hair, and the church bells rang in the distance and everything in the world was in alignment.

Everyone has a limit - a point at which they can't take any more - and, almost out of nowhere, I had reached mine.

You are, of course, allowed to love food and music and champagne and rare sunny afternoons in October. You can love the sight of waterfalls and the smell of old books.

I liked the warmth of her body against mine and realized the pathos of being a human. Of being a mortal creature who was essentially alone but needed the myth of togetherness with others. Friends, children, lovers. It was an attractive myth. It was a myth you could easily inhabit.

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.

We had technology to care for us now, and we didn't need emotions. We were alone. We worked together for our preservation, but emotionally we needed no one.

I think life always provides reasons to not die, if we listen hard enough. Those reasons can stem from the past - the people who raised us, maybe, or friends or lovers - or from the future - the possibilities we would be switching off.

When looking at triggers for mental health problems, therapists often identify an intense change in someone's life as a major factor.

The tea seemed to be making things better. It was a hot drink made of leaves, used in times of crisis as a means of restoring normality.

If you live long enough you realise that every proven fact is later disproved and then proven again.

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.

Everyone represses everything. Do you think any of these "normal" human beings really do exactly what they want to do all the time? 'Course not. It's just the same. We're middle-class and we're British. Repression is in our veins.

Some humans not only liked violence, but craved it, I realised. Not because they wanted pain, but because they already had pain and wanted to be distracted away from that kind of pain with a lesser kind.

But, as time grew on, I knew something I hadn't known earlier. I knew that down wasn't the only direction. If you hung in there, if you stuck it out, then things got better. They get better and then they get worse and then they get better.

To believe in the things we feel at that point is wrong, because those feelings would disappear with food or sleep.

Music doesn't get in. Music is already in. Music simply uncovers what is there, makes you feel emotions that you didn't necessarily know you had inside you, and runs around waking them all up. A rebirth of sorts.

I was scared. I couldn't not be. Being scared is what anxiety is all about.

For centuries I have thought all my despair is grief. But people get over grief. They get over even the most serious grief in a matter of years. If not get over then at least live beside. And the way they do this is by investing in other people, through friendship, through family, through teaching, through love.

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.

After reading the news, I go on Twitter. I don't have an account but I find it interesting - all the different voices, the squabbles, the arrogance of certainty, the ignorance, the occasional, but wonderful, compassion, and watching the evolution of language head towards a new kind of hieroglyphics.

That was the price of human civilization - to create it, they had to close down the door to their true selves. And so they are lost, that is how I understand it. And that is why they invented art: books, music, films, plays, painting, sculpture. They invented them as bridges back to themselves, back to who they are. But however close they get, they are forever removed

Another strange thing was how absence had intensified my feelings for her. How I craved the sweet everyday reality of just being with her, of having a mundane conversation about how our days had been. The gentle but unbettered comfort of coexistence. I couldn't think of a better purpose for the universe than for her to be in it.

Happy Christmas!' the man said.
'Yes', Charles Dickens said, who couldn't bring himself to say 'Happy Christmas' back.
'Isn't it the best of times?' the man went on.
The cat gave a gentle miaow of disagreement in his arms as Charles Dickens nodded. 'Yes. And the worst.

I was already feeling a kind of homesickness for a present I was still living

By doing this, apparently they have earned the right to change its name to "beef," which is the monosyllable furthest away from "cow," because the last thing a human wants to think about when eating cow is an actual cow.

You reach a certain age
sometimes it's fifteen, sometimes it's forty-six
and you realize the cliche you have adopted for yourself isn't working.

This was, I realized, a beautiful planet. Maybe it was the most beautiful of all. But beauty creates its own troubles. You look at a waterfall or an ocean or a sunset, and you find yourself wanting to share it with someone.

An impossibility is just a possibility you don't understand yet

Kissing was very much like eating. But instead of reducing the appetite, the food consumed actually increased it. The food wasn't matter, it had no mass, and yet it seemed to convert into a very delicious energy inside me.

It was then I realised the one thing worse than having a dog hate you is having a dog love you.

A watched pot never boils. That's all you need to know about quantum physics.

Where we are from there is no remorse because action has a logical motive and always results in the best outcome for the given situation.

I soon discovered the Hat and Feathers was a misleading name. In it there was no hat, and absolutely no feathers. There were just heavily inebriated people with red faces laughing at their own jokes. This, I soon discovered, was a typical pub. The 'pub' was an invention of humans living in England, designed as compensation for the fact that they were humans living in England. I rather liked the place.

She might not have felt everything she had felt in those lives, but she had the capability. She might have missed those particular opportunities that led her to become an Olympic swimmer, or traveller, or a vineyard owner, or a rock star, or a planet-saving glaciologist, or a Cambridge graduate, or a mother, or million other things, but she was still in in some way all of those people. They were all her. She could of been all those amazing people, and that wasn't depressing, as she had thought. Not at all. It was inspiring. Because now she saw the kinds of things she could do when she put herself to work.

There was comfort in that. The knowledge that wherever you were in the universe, the small things were always exactly the same. Attracting and Repelling. It was only by not looking closely enough that you saw difference.

What you learn when you are ill, about what hurts, can then be applied to the better times, too. Pain is one hell of a teacher.

Sex can damage love but love can't damage sex.

I stared at the tweet I was about to post. It wasn't going to add anything to my life. Or anyone else's life. It was just going to lead to more checking of my phone, like Pepys with his pocket watch. I pressed delete, and felt a strange relief as I watch each letter disappear.

The greatest stories appeal to our deepest selves, the parts of us snobbery can't reach, the parts that connect the child to the adult and the brain to the heart and reality to dreams. Stories, at their essence, are enemies of snobbery. And a book snob is the enemy of the book.

So he knew terrible things- even the most terrible things-couldn't stop the world from turning. Life went on. And he made a promise to himself that, when he grew older, he'd try to be like his mother. Colourful, and happy and kind and full of joy.

I understand that the way you stop time is by stopping being ruled by it. I am no longer drowning in my past, or fearful of my future. How can I be? The future is you.

Your life will have 25,000 days in it. Make sure you remember some of them.

Anxiety,' Kierkegaard wrote, in the middle of the nineteenth century, 'is the dizziness of freedom.

Open your mind, this is only a song,
But the way to be happy is to admit you were wrong.

Let's not forget The Things They Do To Make Themselves Happy That Actually Make Them Miserable. This is an infinite list. It includes - shopping, watching TV, taking the better job, getting the bigger house, writing a semi-autobiographical novel, educating their young, making their skin look mildly less old and harboring a vague desire to believe there might be a meaning to it all.

Do not watch TV aimlessly. Do not go on social media aimlessly. Always be aware of what you are doing, and why you are doing it. Don't value TV less. Value it more. Then you will watch it less. Unchecked distractions will lead you to distraction.

Things people say to depressives that they don't say in other life-threatening situations:

'Come on, I know you've got tuberculosis, but it could be worse. At least no one's died.'
'Why do you think you got cancer of the stomach?'
'Yes, I know, colon cancer is hard, but you want to try living with someone who has got it. Sheesh. Nightmare.'
'Oh, Alzheimer's you say? Oh, tell me about it, I get that all the time.'
'Ah, meningitis. Come on, mind over matter.'
'Yes, yes, your leg is on fire, but talking about it all the time isn't going to help things, is it?'
'Okay. Yes. Yes. Maybe your parachute has failed. But chin up.

No two moralities match. Accept different shapes, so long as they aren't sharp enough to hurt.

The first rule of marriage: solve the mystery, end the love.

Noise is life.
Silence is death.
But now, just for this moment, silence doesn't seem so bad. It seems like a desired ending, a destination, a place where noise wants to reach.

Humans, in the day that has been the Earth, have been here for less than a minute. We're a late-night piss in the toilet, that's all we are.

He wrote me a prescription for more diazepam and advised I take things "one day at a time," as if there were another way for days to be experienced.

I am petrified of where my mind can go, because I know where it has already been.

You arrived, with baby feet and hands and infinite happiness, and then the happiness slowly evaporated as your feet and hands grew bigger.

Ari believed we are all a simulation. Matter is an illusion. Everything is silicon. He could be right. But your emotions? They're solid.

I'm French. I mean, that's my subject. Was also my nationality, too, though who lets nationality define them? Apart from idiots.

I had never been one of those males who were scared of tears. I'd been a Cure fan, for God's sake.

People joke, in our field, about Pythagoras and his religious cult based on perfect geometry and other abstract mathematical forms, but if we are going to have religion at all then a religion of mathematics seems ideal, because if God exists then what is He but a mathematician?

I unclip the lead from Abraham's collar and he stays by my side and looks up at me, confused, as if perplexed by the concept of freedom. I relate.

And then he - Tchaikovsky - turned towards the little lectern that was on the stage, picked up his baton and held it in the air. He paused a moment. It was like watching an old wizard with a wand, summoning the energy needed to cast a spell...
Time slowed inside that moment.
Then the music began.

Everything is going to be all right. Or, if not, everything is going to be, so let's not worry.

The die, and so they have impatience.

Living with anxiety, turning up, and doing stuff with anxiety takes a strength most people will never know.

I do not like wearing clothes," I said, with quite delicate precision. "They chafe. They are uncomfortable around my genitals." And then, remembering all I had learned from Cosmopolitan magazine, I leaned in toward them and added what I thought would be the clincher. "They may seriously hinder my chances of achieving a tantric full-body orgasm.

After a while, didn't you crave flaws? Love and lust and misunderstandings, and maybe even a little violence to liven things up? Didn't light need shade? Didn't it? Maybe it didn't. Maybe I was missing the point.

I felt the beautiful melancholy of being human, captured perfectly in the setting of a sun. Because, as with a sunset, to be human was to be in-between things; a day, bursting with desperate colour as it headed irreversibly towards night.

We were made from stardust, like everything in the universe, and we - each of us - carried a power inside us. A power that couldn't be destroyed anymore than the universe could be destroyed.

To be calm becomes a kind of revolutionary act. To be happy with your own non-upgraded existence. To be comfortable with our messy, human selves, would not be good for business. Yet we have no other world to live in. And

The computer was primitive. It had the words 'Macbook Pro' on it, and a keypad full if letters and numbers, and a lot of arrows pointing in every possible direction. It seemed like a metaphor for human existence.

There are things I have experienced I will never again be able to experience for the first time: love, a kiss, Tchaikovsky, a Tahitian sunset, jazz, a hot dog, a Bloody Mary. That is the nature of things. History was - is - a one-day street. You have to keep walking forwards. But you don't always need to look ahead. Sometimes you can just look around and be happy right where you are.

Beauty
be not caused," said Emily Dickinson. "It is."
In one way she was wrong. The scattering of light over a long distance creates a sunset. The crashing of ocean waves on a beach is created by tides, which are themselves the result of gravitational forces exerted by the sun and the moon and the rotation of the Earth. Those are causes.
The mystery lies in how those things become beautiful.

Goals are the source of misery. An unattained goal causes pain, but actually achieving it brings only a brief satisfaction.

Illness has a lot to teach wellness. But when I am ill I forget these things. The trick is to keep hold of that knowledge. To turn recovery into prevention. To live how I live when I am ill, without being ill.

And for three weeks I was trapped in my own mind again. But this time, I had weapons. One of them, maybe the most important, was this knowledge: I have been ill before, then well again. Wellness is possible.

You had to stay consistent to life's delusions. All you had was your perspective, so objective truth was meaningless. You had to choose a dream and stick with it. Everything else was a con.And once you had tasted truth and love in the same potent cocktail there had to be no more tricks.

The possibility of pain is where love stems from

Avice for a human.
87. Dark matter is needed to hold galaxies together. Your mind is a Galaxy. More dark than light. But the light makes it worthwhile.
88. Which is to say: don't kill yourself. Even when the darkness is total. Always know that life is not still. Time is space. You are moving through that galaxy. Wait for the stars.

So most of what we know now will be disproved or reassessed in the future. That is how science works, not through blind faith, but continual doubt.

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.

Humans, as a rule, don't like mad people unless they are good at painting, and only then once they are dead. But the definition of mad, on Earth, seems to be very unclear and inconsistent. What is perfectly sane in one era turns out to be insane in another. The earliest humans walked around naked with no problem. Certain humans, in humid rainforests mainly, still do so. So, we must conclude that madness is sometimes a question of time, and sometimes of postcode.
Basically, the key rule is, if you want to appear sane on Earth you have to be in the right place, wearing the right clothes, saying the right things, and only stepping on the right kind of grass.

People are craving not just physical space but the space to be mentally free. A space from unwanted distracted thoughts that clutter our heads like pop-up advertising of the mind in an already frantic world. And that space is still there to be found. It's just that we can't rely on it. We have to consciously seek it out.

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.

I've never had a coconut chilli Martini before,' I tell him. 'That's the thing with getting older. You run out of new things to try.' 'Oh, I don't know,' he says, still the optimist. 'I have lived beside one ocean or another most of my life and I have yet to see the same wave twice. It's the mana, you see. It's everywhere. It's never still. It keeps the world new. The whole planet is a coconut chilli Martini.

I looked at the transprent yellow liquid in the glass. I tasted it and tasted fermentation. In other words I tasted life on Earth. For everything that lives here ferments, ages, becomes diseased. But as things made their decline from ripeness they could taste wonderful, I realised

There comes a time when the only way to start living is to tell the truth. To be who you really are, even if it is dangerous.

Boring people stay alive. Aunt Eda said.

There are other questions too that humans have in bookstores. Such as, is it one of those books they read to feel clever, or one of those they will pretend they never read in order to stay looking clever? Will it make them laugh or cry? Or will it simply force them to stare out of the window watching the tracks of raindrops? Is it a true story? Or is it a false one? Is it the kind of story that will work on their brain or one which aims for lower organs? Is it one of those books that ends up acquiring religious followers or getting burned by them? Is

It might be a strange irony that the cure for worrying about ageing is sometimes, well, ageing.

The price of imagination is pain.

Cities twinkling at night as you drive past them, as if they are fallen constellations of stars.

I have a thin skin.

I think this is part and parcel of depression and anxiety - to be precise - being a person quite likely to get depression and anxiety … I don't fight it. I accept things more. This is who I am. And besides, fighting it actually makes it worse. The trick is to befriend depression and anxiety. To be thankful for them, because you can deal with them a lot better. And the way I have befriended them is by thanking them for my thin skin.

Sure, without a thin skin I would have never known those terrible days of nothingness. Those days of either panic, or intense, bone-scorching lethargy. The days of self-hate, or drowning under invisible waves. I sometimes felt, in my self-pity, too fragile for a world of speed and right angles and noise. (I love Jonathan Rottenberg's evolutionary theory of depression, that is to do with the being unable to adapt to the pendent: 'An ancient mood system has collided with a highly novel operating environment created by a remarkable species.')

But would I go along to a magical mind spa and ask for a skin-thickening treatment? Probably not. You need to feel life's terror to feel its wonder.

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.

But there was a leap to be made from not caring about someone to wanting to eat them.

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.

It occurred to me that human beings didn't live beyond a hundred because they simply weren't up for it. Psychologically, I mean. You kind of ran out. There wasn't enough self to keep going. You grew too bored of your own mind. Of the way life repeated itself. How, after a while, there wasn't a smile or gesture that you hadn't seen before. There wasn't a change in the world order that didn't echo other changes in the world order. And the news stopped being new.

...the main lesson of history is humans don't learn from history.