Quotes By Author: matt haig
“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.”
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“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.”
“Sometimes things are a change for the better and the worse at the same time, like the internet. Or the electric keyboard. Or pre-chopped garlic. Or the theory of relativity.”
“Anxiety,’ Kierkegaard wrote, in the middle of the nineteenth century, ‘is the dizziness of freedom.”
“Remember no one really cares what you look like. They care what they look like. You are the only person in the world to have worried about your face.”
“Places don’t matter to people any more. Places aren’t the point. People are only ever half present where they are these days. They always have at least one foot in the great digital nowhere.”
“The longer you live, the harder it becomes. To grab them. Each little moment as it arrives. To be living in something other than the past or the future. To be actually here.”
“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.”
“It may seem strange, falling in love with someone because of a gesture, but sometimes you can read an entire person in a single moment. The way you study a grain of sand and understand the universe. Love at first sight might or might not be a thing, but love in a single moment is.”
“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.”
“If you live long enough you realise that every proven fact is later disproved and then proven again.”
“Now, Nikolas was a happy boy. Well, actually, no. He would have told you he was happy, if you asked him, and he certainly tried to be happy, but sometimes being happy is quite tricky. I suppose what I am saying is that Nikloas was a boy who believed in happiness, the way he believed in elves and trolls and pixies, but he had never actually seen an elf or a troll or a pixie, and he hadn’t really seen proper happiness either. At least, not for a very long time. He didn’t have it easy.”
“Perhaps a wish was just a hope with better aim.”
“He smiles a little. This is the point of being a teacher. A glimmer of hope where you thought it didn’t exist.”