Top 100 Matt Haig Quotes
#1. Goals are the source of misery. An unattained goal causes pain, but actually achieving it brings only a brief satisfaction.
Matt Haig
#2. 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
#3. There are as many versions of a book as there are readers.
Matt Haig
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. Unlike a book or a film depression doesn't have to be about something.
Matt Haig
#7. 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
#8. I think that basically we are all helping people. All the time. Every time any of us speaks openly about mental health, we are helping normalize an illness that is still handled with protective goggles and safety gloves.
Matt Haig
#9. A paradox: The things you don't need to live - books, art, cinema, wine, and so on - are the things you need to live.
Matt Haig
#10. It is not the length of life that matters. It's the depth. But while burrowing, keep the sun above you.
Matt Haig
#11. 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
#12. He just stared at me, his eyes shining blank circles, and seemed to know exactly who it was, standing behind the juniper bushes. But he stayed quiet. He was a good dog. And I loved him.
Matt Haig
#13. 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.
Matt Haig
#14. 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
#15. Peanut butter sandwiches go perfectly well with a glass of white wine. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
Matt Haig
#16. New technology, on Earth, just means something you will laugh at in five years. Value the stuff you won't laugh at in five years. Like love. Or a good poem. Or a song. Or the sky.
Matt Haig
#17. Politeness is often fear. Kindness is always courage. But caring is what makes you human. Care more, become more human.
Matt Haig
#18. You shouldn't have been born. Your existence is as close to impossible as can be. To dismiss the impossible is to dismiss yourself.
Matt Haig
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. We are all in our own reality.
Matt Haig
#22. Don't be proud of only liking realism. It is like being proud of not having an imagination.
Matt Haig
#23. Life is waiting for you. You might be stuck here for a while, but the world isn't going anywhere. Hang on in there if you can. Life is always worth it.
Matt Haig
#24. 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
#25. In your mind, change the name of every day to Saturday. And change the name of work to play.
Matt Haig
#26. 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
#27. This was such a strange world. Of course, when viewed afresh there were only strange worlds but this one must have been strangest of all.
Matt Haig
#28. 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
#29. And also, of course, there is the ultimate, all-important question: does it have a dog in it? (This book, by the way, does indeed have a dog in it, and this fact would very much excite a human but unfortunately does nothing for you.)
Matt Haig
#30. Happiness is not out here. It is in there.
Matt Haig
#31. Well, what the fuck would an extraterrestrial life form want to come here for?
Matt Haig
#32. 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
#33. Ain't no choice in love and life
Matt Haig
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. And yet, when everything is alien the alien becomes familiar.
Matt Haig
#38. 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.
Matt Haig
#39. I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars,
Matt Haig
#40. 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
#41. End-users not technologies shape the market. Consequently marketers need to stay abreast not only of technological developments but also of the way people respond to them.
Matt Haig
#42. Make sure, as often as possible, you are doing something you'd be happy to die doing.
Matt Haig
#43. If getting drunk was how people forgot they were mortal, then hangovers were how they remembered.
Matt Haig
#44. Tough love doesn't work. Turns out that just good old 'love' is enough.
Matt Haig
#45. 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
#46. School is a joke. But go along with it, because you are very near to the punchline.
Matt Haig
#47. Now, these were wounds I could have healed with a single thought. Just to feel pain, sometimes, was enough to cancel it.
Matt Haig
#48. 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
#50. Stigma is particularly cruel for depressives, because stigma affects thoughts and depression is a disease of thoughts.
Matt Haig
#51. 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
#52. It's not you. It's them. (No, really. It is.)
Matt Haig
#53. So love is about finding the right person to hurt you?"
"Pretty much.
Matt Haig
#54. Don't always try to be cool. The whole universe is cool. It's the warm bits that matter.
Matt Haig
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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.
Matt Haig
#62. You gave up the universe for a life on the sofa?' 'I didn't realise that at the time.
Matt Haig
#63. It was making me think about human life in a way I didn't want to think about it. Human life, I realized, got progressively worse as you got older, by the sound of things.
Matt Haig
#64. You get up. You put on your clothes. And then you put on your personality. Choose wisely.
Matt Haig
#65. Be curious. Question everything. A present fact is just a future fiction.
Matt Haig
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. You can clone human brains but not what is stored inside them
Matt Haig
#69. Life is so infinitely hard. It involves a thousand tasks all at once. And I am a thousand different people, all fleeing away from the centre.
Matt Haig
#70. 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.
Matt Haig
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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.
Matt Haig
#74. 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
#75. The possibility of pain is where love stems from
Matt Haig
#76. It was, of course, another test. Everything in human life was a test. That was why they all looked so stressed out.
Matt Haig
#77. Because prime numbers are fucking serious, man. Some serious shit. They can make you lose it. They're like sirens. They call you in with their isolated beauty and before you know it you are in some major mind-shit.
Matt Haig
#78. 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
#79. If God exists, what is He but a mathematician?
Matt Haig
#80. I thought of Andrew Martin kissing her. This was what humans did. They kissed. Like so many human things, it made no sense. Or maybe, if you tried it, the logic would unfold.
Matt Haig
#81. Obey your head. Obey your heart. Obey your gut. In fact, obey everything except commands.
Matt Haig
#82. 47. A cow is a cow even if you call it beef.
Matt Haig
#83. What was reality? An objective truth? A collective illusion? A majority opinion? The product of historical understanding? A bream?
Matt Haig
#84. I love you, she said. And I knew the point of love right then. The point of love was to help you survive.
Matt Haig
#85. 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.
Matt Haig
#86. This meant he belonged to a special subcategory of human called a "teenager," the chief characteristics of which were a weakened resistance to gravity, a vocabulary of grunts, a lack of spatial awareness, copious amounts of masturbation, and an unending appetite for cereal.
Matt Haig
#87. Start fires. But only metaphorically. Unless you are cold and it's a safe setting. In which case: start fires.
Matt Haig
#88. 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
#89. No one is ever completely right about anything. Anywhere.
Matt Haig
#90. There is only one genre in fiction, the genre is called book.
Matt Haig
#91. Wherever you are, at any moment, try and find something beautiful. A face, a line out of a poem, the clouds out of a window, some graffiti, a wind farm. Beauty cleans the mind.
Matt Haig
#92. By thinking of the cloud, I thirsted for the raindrop.
Matt Haig
#93. 27. Dogs are geniuses of loyalty. And that is a good kind of genius to have.
Matt Haig
#94. Laughter, along with madness, seemed to be the only way out, the emergency exit for humans.
Matt Haig
#95. Anne Sexton knows the mind, Walt Whitman knows grass, but Emily Dickinson knows everything.
Matt Haig
#96. Books were about movement. They were about quests and journeys. Beginnings and middles and ends, even if not in that order. They were about new chapters. And leaving old ones behind.
Matt Haig
#97. The price of imagination is pain.
Matt Haig
#98. An impossibility is just a possibility you don't understand yet
Matt Haig
#99. (A male human's testicles were the most attractive thing about him, I realized, and vastly unappreciated by humans themselves, who would very often rather look at almost anything else, including smiling faces.)
Matt Haig
#100. 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
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