Matt Haig Quotes

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?
Matt Haig
It was, of course, another test. Everything in human life was a test. That was why they all looked so stressed out.
Matt Haig
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.
Matt Haig
Laughter, I realized, was the reverberating sound of a truth hitting a lie.
Matt Haig
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.
Matt Haig
Misery, like yoga, is not a competitive sport
Matt Haig
There is no standard normal. Normal is subjective. There are seven billion versions of normal on this planet.
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
The best way to think of the ageing process in relation to a human face is to imagine a map of an area of innocent land which slowly becomes a city with many long and winding routes.
Matt Haig
The next day I had a hangover.I realised that if getting drunk was how people forgot they were mortal, then hangovers were how they remembered.
Matt Haig
Now, consider this.　　A human life is on average 80 Earth years or around 30,000 Earth days. Which means they are born, they make some friends, eat a few meals, they get married, or they don’t get married, have a child or two, or not, drink a few thousand glasses of wine, have sexual intercourse a few times, discover a lump somewhere, feel a bit of regret, wonder where all the time went, know they should have done it differently, realise they would have done it the same, and then they die. Into the great black nothing. Out of space. Out of time. The most trivial of trivial zeroes. And that’s it, the full caboodle. All confined to the same mediocre planet.
Matt Haig
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.
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
I couldn't believe it. I had broken the law simply by not wearing clothes.
Matt Haig
Flowers, after love, must have been the best advert planet Earth had going for it.
Matt Haig
Be proud to act like a normal human being. Keep daylight hours, get a regular job, and mix in the company of people with a fixed sense of right and wrong.
Matt Haig
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.
Matt Haig
He has spent weeks on the pristine, frosty shore of Lake Baikal in Siberia. He has drunk himself stupid in the fairy-tale blood brothels of old Dubrovnik, lounged in red-smoke dens in Laos, enjoyed the New York blackout of 1977, and more recently, feasted on Vegas showgirls in the Dean Martin suite at the Bellagio. He has watched Hindu abstainers wash away their sins in the Ganges, danced a midnight tango on a boulevard in Buenos Aires, and bitten into a faux geisha under the shade of a shogun pavilion in Kyoto.
Matt Haig
Make sure, as often as possible, you are doing something you’d be happy to die doing.
Matt Haig
So love is about finding the right person to hurt you?”“Pretty much.
Matt Haig
Blood doesn't satisfy cravings. It magnifies them.
Matt Haig
She said being human is being a young child on Christmas Day who receives an absolutely magnificent castle. And there is a perfect photograph of this castle on the box and you want more than anything to play with the castle and the knights and the princesses because it looks like such a perfectly human world, but the only problem is that the castle isn’t built. It’s in tiny intricate pieces, and although there’s a book of instructions you don’t understand it. And nor can your parents or Aunt Sylvie. So you are just left, crying at the ideal castle on the box which no one would ever be able to build
Matt Haig
Hate is a pointless emotion to have inside you. It is like eating a scorpion to punish it for stinging you.
Matt Haig
ILikeThe WayThat when youTiltPoemsOn their sideTheyLook likeMiniatureCities FromA long wayAway. SkyscrapersMade outOfWords.
Matt Haig
No one will understand you. It is not, ultimately, that important. What is important is that you understand you.
Matt Haig
And yet, I was scared of falling asleep, because the moment I fell asleep my wounds would heal and right then I didn’t want that to happen. Right then, I found a strange but real comfort in the pain.
Matt Haig
The first rule of marriage: solve the mystery, end the love.
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
A million people a year kill themselves. Between ten and twenty million people a year try to. Worldwide, men are over three times more likely to kill themselves than women.
Matt Haig
Goals are the source of misery. An unattained goal causes pain, but actually achieving it brings only a brief satisfaction.
Matt Haig
(T)here are only two things that are true 100 out of 100 times and that is that you live and also that you die and every other thing is not true or false it is a mix. It is both. It is none.
Matt Haig
When you are depressed you feel alone, and that no one is going through quite what you are going through. You are so scared of appearing in any way mad you internalise everything, and you are so scared that people will alienate you further you clam up and don’t speak about it, which is a shame, as speaking about it helps.
Matt Haig
The price for being intelligent enough to be the first species to be fully aware of the cosmos might just be a capacity to feel a whole universe’s worth of darkness.
Matt Haig
We are all echoes of each other. We are all humans and feel both despair and happiness. Our similarities, as a species, are staggering. And our mental fragility is directly tied up with our humanity. We have nothing to be ashamed of in being human, any more than a tree should be ashamed of having branches. Let’s accept our own nature. Let’s be kind to ourselves and to each other. Let’s never add to the pain by blaming ourselves. We are all so weird that, really, none of us are. There are seven billion versions of strange on this freak wonder of a planet. We are all part of that. All freaks. All wonderful.
Matt Haig
Understand, for instance, that having a sad thought, even having a continual succession of sad thoughts, is not the same as being a sad person. You can walk through a storm and feel the wind but you know you are not the wind.That is how we must be with our minds. We must allow ourselves to feel their gales and downpours, but all the time knowing this is just necessary weather.When I sink deep, now, and I still do from time to time, I try and understand that there is another, bigger and stronger part of me that is not sinking. It stands unwavering.
Matt Haig
Even more staggeringly, depression is a disease so bad that people are killing themselves because of it in a way they do not kill themselves with any other illness. Yet people still don’t really think depression really is that bad. If they did, they wouldn't say the things they say.
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
I wanted to be dead. No. That's not quite right. I didn't want to be dead, I just didn't want to be alive.
Matt Haig
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.
Matt Haig
I didn't totally fit in. I kind of disintegrated around people and became what they wanted me to be. But paradoxically, I felt an intensity inside me all the time. I didn't know what it was, but it kept building, like water behind a dam. Later, when I was properly depressed and anxious, I saw the illness as an accumulation of all that thwarted intensity. A kind of breaking through. As though, if you find it hard enough to let your self be free, your self breaks in, flooding your mind in an attempt to drown all those failed half-versions of you.
Matt Haig
It fascinated me how depression and anxiety overlap with post-traumatic stress disorder. Had we been through some trauma we didn't know about? Was the noise and speed of modern life the trauma for our caveman brains? Was I that soft? Or was life a kind of war most people didn't see?
Matt Haig
One cliche attached to bookish people is that they are lonely, but for me books were my way out of being lonely.
Matt Haig
The way out is never through yourself.
Matt Haig
What doesn't kill you very often makes you weaker. What doesn't kill you can leave you limping for the rest of your days. What doesn't kill you can make you scared to leave your house, or even your bedroom, and have you trembling, or mumbling incoherently, or leaning with your head on a window pane, wishing you could return to the time before the thing that didn't kill you.
Matt Haig
Forcing yourself to see the world through love's gaze can be healthy. Love is an attitude to life. It can save us.
Matt Haig
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.
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
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
And after that, after the awkward shuffling away of that last thin layer of clothes, words retreated to the sounds they once were. We had sex. 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. I wondered why they weren’t prouder of it. Of this magic. I wondered why, if they had to have flags, why they didn’t just opt for one with a picture of sex.
Matt Haig
The key to happiness - or that even more desired thing, calmness - lies not in always thinking happy thoughts. No. That is impossible. No mind on earth with any kind of intelligence could spend a lifetime enjoying only happy thoughts. They key is in accepting your thoughts, all of them, even the bad ones. Accept thoughts, but don't become them. Understand, for instance, that having a sad thought, even having a continual succession of sad thoughts, is not the same as being a sad person.
Matt Haig
Human history is full of depressing things like colonization, disease, racism, sexism...inventions of things which they had no idea how to handle (the atomic bomb, the Internet, the semicolon)....And through it all there has always been some truly awful food.
Matt Haig
Minds have their own weather systems. You are in a hurricane. Hurricanes run out of energy eventually. Hold on.
Matt Haig
To lose someone you love is the very worst thing in the world. It creates an invisible hole that you feel you are falling down and will never end. People you love make the world real and solid and when they suddenly go away forever, nothing feels solid any more.
Matt Haig
There is this idea that you either read to escape or you read to find yourself. I don't really see the difference. We find ourselves through the process of escaping.
Matt Haig
There is only one genre in fiction, the genre is called book.
Matt Haig
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. It's 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.
Matt Haig
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. It's 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.
Matt Haig
This is the whole stupid thing about all these unblood relationships. They depend on people staying the same, standing in the same spot they were in over a decade ago, when they first met. Surely the reality is that connections between people aren't permanent, but fleeting and random, like a solar eclipse or clouds meeting in the sky. They exist in a constantly moving universe full of constantly moving objects.
Matt Haig
This was the species whose main excuse for not doing something was 'if only I had more time'. Perfectly valid until you realised they did have more time. Not eternity, granted, but they had tomorrow. And the day after tomorrow. And the day after the day after tomorrow. In fact I would have to write 'the day after' thirty thousand times before a final 'tomorrow' in order to illustrate the amount of time on a humans hands.
Matt Haig