Matt Haig Quotes & Sayings

So, as was often the case, a big fear was beaten by a bigger fear. The best way to beat a monster is to find a scarier one. — Matt Haig

And yet, when everything is alien the alien becomes familiar. — Matt Haig

Connections? I will tell you about connections . . . An amateur German physicist works in a patent office in Bern in Switzerland. He comes up with a theory that, half a century later, will lead to whole Japanese cities being destroyed, along with much of their population. Husbands, wives, sons, daughters. He does not want that connection to form, but that does not stop it forming.'
'You're talking about something very different.'
'No. No, I am not. This is a planet where a daydream can end in death, and where mathematicians can cause an apocalypse. That is my view of the humans. Is it any different from yours? — Matt Haig

Was that true? I didn't know. That was part of being human, I discovered. It was about knowing which lies to tell and when to tell them. To love someone is to lie to them. — 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

In one such shop I saw lots of books in the window. I was reminded that humans have to read books. They actually need to sit down and look at each word consecutively. And that takes time. Lots of time. A human can't just swallow every book going, can't chew different tomes simultaneously, or gulp down near-infinite knowledge in a matter of seconds. They can't just pop a word-capsule in their mouth like we can. Imagine! Being not only mortal but also forced to take some of that precious and limited time and read. No wonder they were a species of primitives. By the time they had read enough books to actually reach a state of knowledge where they can do anything with it they are dead. — 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.
The Abstainer's Handbook (second edition, p. 89) — 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

There are as many versions of a book as there are readers. — Matt Haig

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

A book is a map ... There will be times in your life when you will feel lost and confused. The way back to yourself is through reading. There is not a problem in existence that has not been eased, somewhere and at some time, by a book ... The answers have all been written. And the more you read, the more you will know how to find your way through those difficult times. — 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

Life, especially human life, was an act of defiance. It was never meant to be, and yet it existed in an incredible number of places across a near-infinite number of solar systems. — Matt Haig

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

On Earth, incidentally, civilization is the result of a group of humans coming together and suppressing their instincts. — Matt Haig

Where talk exists, so does hope. — 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

It was a planet full of tests and meta-tests. I suppose they loved tests so much because they believed in free will. — 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

Anxiety takes away all the commas and full stops we need to make sense of ourselves. — Matt Haig

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

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. — Matt Haig

Like evolution itself, there have been rapid advances and crippling setbacks along the way. If the Library of Alexandria had never been burned to the ground it is possible to imagine that we would have built upon the achievements of the ancient Greeks to greater and earlier effect, and therefore it could have been in the time of a Cardano or a Newton or a Pascal that we first put a man on the moon. And we can only wonder where we would be. And at the planets we would have terraformed and colonised by the twenty-first century. Which medical advances we would have made. Maybe if there had been no dark ages, no switching off of the light, we would have found a way never to grow old, to never die. — Matt Haig

You see, the language of words was only one of the human languages. There were many others, as I have pointed out. The language of sighs, the language of silent moments, and most significantly, the language of frowns. — Matt Haig

This was jazz music. It was full of the complexity and contradictions that I would soon learn made humans human. — Matt Haig

This was interesting knowledge: you could only ask questions in certain rooms. There were rooms for sitting and thinking and rooms for inquisition. — 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

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

No one is ever completely right about anything. Anywhere. — 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

A cat, I discovered, was very much like a dog. But smaller, and without the self-esteem issues. — 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

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. — Matt Haig

The cold was a shock. The cold hurt my lungs, and the harsh wind beating against my skin caused me to shake. I wondered if humans ever went outside. They must have been insane if they did. — Matt Haig

There is this idea that you either read to escape or you read to find yourself. — 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

Humans, I was discovering, believed they were in control of their own lives, and so they were in awe of questions and tests, as these made them feel like they had a certain mastery over other people, who had failed in their choices, and who had not worked hard enough on the right answers. — Matt Haig

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

Stigma is particularly cruel for depressives, because stigma affects thoughts and depression is a disease of thoughts. — 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

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

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

When you watch the news and see members of your species in turmoil, do not think there is nothing you can do. But know it is not done by watching news. — 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

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

After all, humans - especially adult ones - want to believe the most mundane truths possible. They need to, in order to stop their world-views, and their sanity, from capsizing and plunging them into the vast ocean of the incomprehensible. — Matt Haig

An apology, said while in dull pain, made me feel as close to human as it was possible to feel. I could have almost written a poem. — Matt Haig

A cow is an Earth-dwelling animal, a domesticated and multipurpose ungulate, which humans treat as a one-stop shop for food, liquid refreshment, fertilizer, and designer footwear. — Matt Haig

On Earth, social networking generally involved sitting down at a nonsentient computer and typing words about needing a coffee and reading about other people needing a coffee, while forgetting to actually make a coffee. — Matt Haig

Happiness is not out here. It is in there. — 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

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

I'd also heard that humans were a life-form of, at best, middling intelligence and prone to violence, deep sexual embarrassment, bad poetry, and walking around in circles. — Matt Haig

To experience beauty on Earth, you needed to experience pain and to know mortality. That is why so much that is beautiful on this planet has to do with time passing and the Earth turning. Which might also explain why to look at such natural beauty was to also feel sadness and a craving for a life unlived. — Matt Haig

I'm sorry,' I said. 'I'm sorry for everything. For the past and the future.' An apology, said while in dull pain, made me feel as close to human as it was possible to feel. I could almost have written a poem. — Matt Haig

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. — Matt Haig

Tragedy is just comedy that hasn't come to fruition. One day we will laugh at this. We will laugh at everything. — Matt Haig

To read, to seek, to know. — Matt Haig

If beauty on Earth is the same as elsewhere: ideal in that it is tantalizing and unsolvable, creating a delicious kind of confusion. — Matt Haig

You can be a depressive and be happy, just as you can be a sober alcoholic. — Matt Haig

The 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. You can walk through a storm and feel the wind but you know you are not the wind. — Matt Haig

Sip, don't gulp. — Matt Haig

That was the remarkable thing about humans - their ability to shape the path of other species, to change their fundamental nature. — Matt Haig

It's not you. It's them. (No, really. It is.) — 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

Boring people stay alive. Aunt Eda said. — Matt Haig

I couldn't believe it. I had broken the law simply by not wearing clothes. — Matt Haig

Reading is added to that great pile of things - work, love, sexual prowess, the words they didn't say when they really needed to say them - that they are bound to feel a bit dissatisfied about. — Matt Haig

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. — Matt Haig

47. A cow is a cow even if you call it beef. — 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

I think intellectualism can be a barrier to reading. The point of a book - song, film, whatever - is to FEEL it. That's why we're here, no? — 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

Laughter, along with madness, seemed to be the only way out, the emergency exit for humans. — Matt Haig

You get up. You put on your clothes. And then you put on your personality. Choose wisely. — 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

Make sure, as often as possible, you are doing something you'd be happy to die doing. — Matt Haig

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. — Matt Haig

No one will understand you. It is not, ultimately, that important. What is important is that you understand you. — Matt Haig

Blood doesn't satisfy cravings. It magnifies them. — Matt Haig

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. — Matt Haig

I played an album called Space Oddity by David Bowie, which, in its simple patterned measure of time, was actually quite enjoyable. — Matt Haig

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

One day, if you get into a position of power, tell people this: just because you can, it doesn't mean you should. There is a power and a beauty in unproved conjectures, unkissed lips and unpicked flowers. — 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

By thinking of the cloud, I thirsted for the raindrop. — Matt Haig

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. — Matt Haig

It was a kind of laugh that made me wish there was no air for those manic waves to travel on and reach my ears. — Matt Haig

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.' Experience surrounds innocence and innocence can never be regained once lost. — Matt Haig

She carried on talking. And as she did so, I realized there could be no cosmic consequence at all if I stopped listening, and with that realization I switched off the phone. — Matt Haig

Even before I had fully discovered the concepts of astrology, homeopathy, organised religion and probiotic yoghurts I was able to work out that what humans may have lacked in physical attractiveness, they made up for in gullibility. — Matt Haig

Your mind is a galaxy. More dark than light. But the light makes it worthwhile. 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. 10. — Matt Haig

2. The news was prioritized in a way I could not understand. For instance, there was nothing on new mathematical observations or still-undiscovered polygons, but quite a bit about politics, which on this planet was essentially all about war and money. Indeed, war and money seemed to be so popular on the news, it should more accurately have been titled The War and Money Show. — Matt Haig

History is a branch of mathematics. So is literature. Economics is a branch of religion. — Matt Haig

What was reality? An objective truth? A collective illusion? A majority opinion? The product of historical understanding? A bream? — Matt Haig

Grief is terror, in its most undiluted form. — Matt Haig

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

I was drinking a cup of tea. I actually enjoyed tea. It was so much better than coffee. It tasted like comfort. — 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

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