Matt Haig Quotes

Misery, like yoga, is not a competitive sport ~ Matt Haig

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. ~ Matt Haig

It' hard to explain depression to people who haven't suffered from it. It is like explaining life on Earth to an alien. The reference points just aren't there. You have to resort to metaphors. ~ Matt Haig

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. ~ Matt Haig

Imagine all the time we had was bottled up, like wine. and handed over to us. How would we make that bottle last? By sipping slowly, appreciating the taste, or by gulping? ~ Matt Haig

A wave can kill you. Or you can ride it. It's sometimes more dangerous to shy away. You can't live your life in fear. You have to be prepared to get on your board and stand on your feet. If you are in the barrel of a wave you have to ignore the fear. You have to be in that moment. You have to carve on through. You get scared, and the next thing you know you are off your board and smashing your head on a rock. I'm never going to live in fear. ~ Matt Haig

In every life there is a moment. A crisis. One that says: what I believe is wrong. It happens to everyone, the only difference is how that knowledge changes them. In most cases, it is simply a case of burying that knowledge and pretending it isn't there. That is how humans grow old. That is ultimately what creases their faces and curves their backs and shrinks their mouths and ambitions. The weight of that denial. The stress of it. This is not unique to humans. The single biggest act of bravery or madness anyone can do is the act of change. ~ Matt Haig

You don't need the world to understand you. It's fine. Some people will never really understand things they haven't experienced. Some will. Be grateful. ~ Matt Haig

But there was a sense of something tipping out of balance. The times seemed out of joint. There was too much decadence. Too much intensity. Too much change. Too much happiness juxtaposed with too much misery. Too much wealth next to too much poverty. The world was becoming faster and louder, and the social systems were becoming as chaotic and fragmented as jazz scores. So there was a craving, in some places, for simplicity, for order, for scapegoats and for bully-boy leaders, for nations to become like religions or cults. It happened every now and then.
It seemed, in the 1930s, that the whole course of humanity was at stake. As it very often does today. Too many people wanted to find an easy answer to complicated questions. It was a dangerous time to be human. To feel or to think or to care. ~ Matt Haig

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

That is what the taste of blood does. It takes away the gap between thought and action.To think is to do. There is no unlived life inside you as the air speeds past your body, as you look down at the dreary villages and market towns ... ~ Matt Haig

A world full of people hating themselves is not a happy world. Buddhism does not seem to be about self-punishment. A key buddhist symbol is that of the lotus flower. The lotus flower grows in mud at the bottom of a pool, but rises above the murky water and blooms in the clear air, pure and beautiful, before eventually dying. This metaphor for spiritual enlightenment also works as a metaphor for hope and change. ~ Matt Haig

I was later to realize that a neatly trimmed lawn was a powerful signifier and should have commanded in me a slight sense of fear and respect, especially in conjunction ~ Matt Haig

Politeness is often fear. Kindness is always courage. But caring is what makes you human. Care more, become more human. ~ Matt Haig

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. ~ Matt Haig

In California the only way to look like you are getting older is to look like you are getting younger...if you can move your forehead over the age of forty, then people become very suspicious. ~ Matt Haig

You are more than the sum of your particles. And that is quite a sum. ~ Matt Haig

It frightened me, how close violence is to the civilized surface of a human being. It wasn't the violence itself that was the worry, it was the amount of effort they'd gone to conceal it. A Homo sapiens was a primitive hunter who had woken each day with the knowledge he could kill. And now, the equivalent knowledge was only that he would wake up and buy something. ~ Matt Haig

You are not the most intelligent creature in the universe. You are not even the most intelligent creature on your planet. The tonal language in the song of a humpback whale displays more complexity than the entire works of Shakespeare. It is not a competition. Well, it is. But don't worry about it. ~ Matt Haig

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. ~ Matt Haig

An annoying thing about depression is that thinking about life is inevitable. Depression makes thinkers out of all of us. ~ Matt Haig

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. ~ Matt Haig

Life is like a chimney - you sometimes have to get through the dark before you see the light. ~ Matt Haig

What is depression? Its like a tornado, theres nothing you can do but sit and wait, and finally when the storm is over ... you are left with the destruction. The scars on your body, the puffy eyes from crying, the exhaustion from fighting a losing battle. It's consuming. ~ Matt Haig

The problem is not that the world is a mess, but that we expect it to be otherwise. ~ Matt Haig

To see something, you have to believe in it. Really believe it. That's the first elf rule. You can't see something you don't believe in. Now try your hardest and see if you can see what you have been looking for. ~ Matt Haig

If you have children and love one more than another, work at it. They will know, even if it's by a single atom less. A single atom is all you need to make a very big explosion. ~ Matt Haig

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. ~ Matt Haig

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. ~ Matt Haig

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

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. ~ Matt Haig

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. ~ Matt Haig

For those that don't know, a human is a real bipedal life form of midrange intelligence, living a largely deluded existence on a small, waterlogged planet in a very lonely corner of the universe. ~ Matt Haig

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

If someone loves you, let them. Believe in that love. Live for them, even when you feel there is no point. ~ Matt Haig

Don't always try to be cool. The whole universe is cool. It's the warm bits that matter. ~ Matt Haig

Walt Whitman was right about at least one thing. You will contradict yourself. You are large. You contain multitudes. ~ Matt Haig

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. ~ Matt Haig

You see, his mother has thrown me out of the house because I was unfaithful to her. Or rather the faith I had wasn't the right kind. Given the absence of mind-reading technology, humans believe monogamy is possible. ~ Matt Haig

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 wasn't perfectly well was the moment I realised I was still very ill indeed. ~ Matt Haig

A policeman grips an arm to take you somewhere, but why does a wife stroke your hand? What was the purpose? It wasn't the touch Cosmopolitan had talked about, and it certainly didn't boost my mood. ~ Matt Haig

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

It is another unsolved mystery in a world full of unsolved mysteries.Now stand up and walk out the way you came, and the moment that fresh air caresses your face, you will realize that that is what makes the world so beautiful. All those unsolved mysteries. And you won't ever want to interfere with that beauty again. ~ Matt Haig

I have long convinced myself that the piano is like a drug, seductive and strong, and it can mess you up, it can awaken dead emotions, it can drown you in your lost selves. It is a nervous breakdown waiting to happen. ~ Matt Haig

Ain't no choice in love and life ~ Matt Haig

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

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

Laughter, I realized, was the reverberating sound of a truth hitting a lie. ~ Matt Haig

It made me lonely. And when I say lonely, I mean the kind of loneliness that howls through you like a desert wind. It wasn't just the loss of people I had known but also the loss of myself. The loss of who I had been when I had been with them. ~ Matt Haig

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

The price of imagination is pain. ~ Matt Haig

Maybe that is what it takes to love someone. Finding a happy mystery you would like to unravel for ever. ~ Matt Haig

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. ~ Matt Haig

Don't compare your actual self to a hypothetical self. Don't drown in a sea of 'what ifs'. Don't clutter your mind by imagining other versions of you, in parallel universes where you made different decisions. ~ Matt Haig

Beware of the gap. The gap between where you are and where you want to be. Simply thinking of the gap widens it. And you end up falling through. ~ Matt Haig

That's the odd thing about depression and anxiety. It acts like an intense fear of happiness, even as you yourself consciously want that happiness more than anything. So if it catches you smiling, even fake smiling, then - well, that stuff's just not allowed and you know it, so here comes ten tons of counterbalance. ~ Matt Haig

We have the knowledge to realise we are just a mess of quanta and particles, like everything else is, and yet we keep trying to separate ourselves from the universe we live in, to give ourselves a meaning above that of a tree or a rock or a cat or a turtle. ~ Matt Haig

Because words are a magic too, and they can contain everything. ~ Matt Haig

But a human, in its own small way, was a kind of miraculous achievement, in mathematical terms. ~ Matt Haig

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. ~ Matt Haig

He smiled softly. "People you love never die." I had no idea of the sense of his words, but they stayed with me for centuries. ~ Matt Haig

I could hardly breathe, watching her, and didn't even notice it was beginning to rain. I was just mesmerized by her. All eleven trillion cells of her. ~ Matt Haig

The die, and so they have impatience. ~ Matt Haig

I slipped into a state beyond my usual grief and restlessness and anxiety and despair – one of not feeling anything at all. And when I felt nothing I almost became nostalgic for the grief; at least when you felt pain you knew you were still alive. ~ Matt Haig

Medication is an incredibly attractive concept. Not just for the person with depression, or the person running a pharmaceutical firm, but for society as a whole. It underlines the idea we have hammered into us by the hundred thousand TV ads we have seen that everything can be fixed by consuming things. ~ Matt Haig

And I felt an incredible excitement at being able to witness the love reemerge inside her, because it was a total, prime-of-life love. The kind that could only be possible in someone who was going to die at some point in the future, and also someone who had lived enough to know that loving and being loved back was a hard thing to get right, but when you managed it, you could see forever. Two mirrors, opposite and facing each other at perfectly parallel angles, viewing themselves through the other, the view as deep as infinity. ~ Matt Haig

Love now. Love right now.
If you have someone to love, do it this instant

LOVE FEARLASSLY. ~ Matt Haig

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. ~ Matt Haig

Why did we get married? What is the point of it? What are the rules involved? ~ Matt Haig

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. ~ Matt Haig

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 ~ Matt Haig

(It's a weird thing, depression. Even now, writing this with a good distance of fourteen years from my lowest point, I haven't fully escaped. You get over it, but at the same time you never get over it. It comes back in flashes, when you are tired or anxious or have been eating the wrong stuff, and catches you off guard. I woke up with it a few days ago, in fact. I felt its dark wisps around my head, that ominous life-is-fear feeling. But then, after a morning with the best five- and six-year-olds in the world, it subsided. it is now an aside. Something to put brackets around. Life lesson: the way out is never through yourself.) ~ Matt Haig

It is strange how close the past is, even when you imagine it to be so far away. Strange how it can just jump out of a sentence and hit you. Strange how every object or word can house a ghost. ~ Matt Haig

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

There was also the option of a "vest," which covered the marginally less shameful chest area. This area included the sensitive skin protrusions known as "nipples." I had no idea what purpose nipples served, though I did notice a pleasurable sensation when I tenderly stroked my fingers over them. ~ Matt Haig

Advice for a human.
81. You can't find happiness looking for the meaning of life. Meaning is only the third most important thing. It comes after loving and being.
82. If you think something is ugly, look harder. Ugliness is just a failure of seeing. ~ Matt Haig

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

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 ~ Matt Haig

To be a human is to state the obvious. Repeatedly. Over and over, until the end of time. ~ Matt Haig

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

Be curious. Question everything. A present fact is just a future fiction. ~ Matt Haig

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. ~ Matt Haig

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

We often find ourselves wishing for more hours in the day, but that wouldn't help anything. The problem, clearly, isn't that we have a shortage of time. It's more that we have an overload of everything else. ~ Matt Haig

We only need to be one person.
We only need to feel one existence.
We don't have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility. ~ Matt Haig

In your mind, change the name of every day to Saturday. And change the name of work to play. ~ Matt Haig

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. ~ Matt Haig

The Dark Ages never ended. ~ Matt Haig

(The main advantage of books over life is that they can be redrafted and redrafted, whereas life, alas, is always a first draft.) ~ Matt Haig

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. ~ Matt Haig

Toronto is the greatest and happiest city on earth, but despite that - maybe because of that - it made me unhappy, as I just lived in an apartment there, never seeing anyone. Once I went to watch the Blue Jays play baseball, but being surrounded by so many people who I knew I could never connect with was the thing that made me want to [leave]. ~ Matt Haig

THE WORLD IS increasingly designed to depress us. Happiness isn't very good for the economy. If we were happy with what we had, why would we need more? How do you sell an anti-ageing moisturiser? You make someone worry about ageing. How do you get people to vote for a political party? You make them worry about immigration. How do you get them to buy insurance? By making them worry about everything. How do you get them to have plastic surgery? By highlighting their physical flaws. How do you get them to watch a TV show? By making them worry about missing out. How do you get them to buy a new smartphone? By making them feel like they are being left behind. 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. ~ Matt Haig

Be nice to other people. At the universal level, they are you. ~ Matt Haig

A problem with living in the twenty-first century..... we are made to feel poor on thirty thousand pounds a year. To feel poorly travelled if we have only been to ten other countries. To feel old if we have a wrinkle. To feel ugly if we aren't photo shopped and filtered. ~ Matt Haig

Perhaps a wish was just a hope with better aim. ~ Matt Haig

Pain is a debt paid off with time. ~ Matt Haig

Everything we need is here, if we give up thinking we need everything. ~ Matt Haig

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. ~ Matt Haig

For me, personally, the point of writing is to connect me to this world, to my fellow humans. We are all miles apart. We have no real means of connecting except via language. And the deepest form of language is storytelling. ~ Matt Haig

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. ~ Matt Haig