Matt Haig Quotes

#1. Andrea told me after that film that there was too much Matt Haig in Matt Haig. She was kind of joking but kind of on to something. So for me, anything that lessens that extreme sense of selfe, that makes me feel me but at a lower volume, is very welcome. ( ... ) Travel has been one of those things.

Matt Haig

#2. The Humans is a laugh-and-cry book. Troubling, thrilling, puzzling, believable and impossible. Matt Haig uses words like a tin-opener. We are the tin.

Jeanette Winterson

#3. The computer was primitive. It had the words 'Macbook Pro' on it, and a keypad full if letters and numbers, and a lot of arrows pointing in every possible direction. It seemed like a metaphor for human existence.

Matt Haig

#4. 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

#5. Their conversation topics are very rarely the things they want to be talking about, and I could write ninety-seven books on body shame and clothing etiquette before you would get even close to understanding them.

Matt Haig

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. Maybe that is what growing up was all about. It was about changing your mind. Opening it right up. Admitting to yourself that you were wrong about stuff.

Matt Haig

#9. And how could I believe that Australian wine was automatically inferior to wine sourced from other regions on the planet when I had never drunk anything but liquid nitrogen?

Matt Haig

#10. You reach a certain age
sometimes it's fifteen, sometimes it's forty-six
and you realize the cliche you have adopted for yourself isn't working.

Matt Haig

#11. We are all potential depressives, but that is never going to be all we are.

Matt Haig

#12. Don't be proud of only liking realism. It is like being proud of not having an imagination.

Matt Haig

#13. Three in the morning is never the time to try and sort out your life.

Matt Haig

#14. We are all in our own reality.

Matt Haig

#15. Marriage was a truly alien concept. There probably weren't enough editions of Cosmopolitan on the planet for me to ever understand it.

Matt Haig

#16. 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

#17. And I stood up, again to help when I was supposed to hurt.

Matt Haig

#18. 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

#19. If the stone falls hard enough the ripples last a lifetime.

Matt Haig

#20. Laughter, I realized, was the reverberating sound of a truth hitting a lie.

Matt Haig

#21. 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

#22. Where talk exists, so does hope.

Matt Haig

#23. Failure is a trick of the light.

Matt Haig

#24. Politeness is often fear. Kindness is always courage. But caring is what makes you human. Care more, become more human.

Matt Haig

#25. 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

#26. Peanut butter sandwiches go perfectly well with a glass of white wine. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

Matt Haig

#27. Ain't no choice in love and life

Matt Haig

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. Catholic, I discovered, meant a type of Christianity for humans who like gold leaf, Latin, and guilt.

Matt Haig

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. On Earth, incidentally, civilization is the result of a group of humans coming together and suppressing their instincts.

Matt Haig

#34. Well, what the fuck would an extraterrestrial life form want to come here for?

Matt Haig

#35. Happiness is not out here. It is in there.

Matt Haig

#36. Suddenly it made me realize why religion was such a big thing around here. Because, yes, sure, God could not exist. But then neither could humans. So if they believed in themselves
the logic must go
why not believe in something that was only a fraction more unlikely?

Matt Haig

#37. They only had Saturdays, because Mondays were a little bit too close to Sundays for Sunday's liking, as if Monday were a collapsed star in the week's solar system, with an excessive gravitational pull.

Matt Haig

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. To be a human is to state the obvious

Matt Haig

#43. Don't aim for perfection. Evolution, and life, only happen through mistakes. 31.

Matt Haig

#44. Minds have their own weather systems. You are in a hurricane. Hurricanes run out of energy eventually. Hold on.

Matt Haig

#45. 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

#46. The weirdest thing about a mind is that you can have the most intense things going on in there but no one else can see them. The world shrugs.

Matt Haig

#47. In your mind, change the name of every day to Saturday. And change the name of work to play.

Matt Haig

#48. 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

#49. Your brain is open. Never let it be closed.

Matt Haig

#50. If you are the type of person who thinks too much about stuff then there is nothing lonelier in the world than being surrounded by a load of people on a different wavelength.

Matt Haig

#51. 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

#52. 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

#53. 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

#54. You are more than the sum of your particles. And that is quite a sum.

Matt Haig

#55. 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

#56. 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

#57. And yet the irony was that she soon placed herself in the margins voluntarily, giving up work for family, because she imagined that when she eventually arrived at her deathbed, she would feel more regret about unborn children than unwritten books.

Matt Haig

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

Matt Haig

#59. 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

#60. Never say 'pull yourself together' or 'cheer up' unless you're also going to provide detailed, foolproof instructions.

Matt Haig

#61. Kissing was very much like eating. But instead of reducing the appetite, the food consumed actually increased it. The food wasn't matter, it had no mass, and yet it seemed to convert into a very delicious energy inside me.

Matt Haig

#62. Light was everything. Sunshine, windows with the blinds open. Pages with short chapters and lots of white space and
Short.
Paragraphs.
Light was everything.

Matt Haig

#63. Listening to music, I realised, was simply the pleasure of counting without realising you were counting.

Matt Haig

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

Matt Haig

#65. But there was a leap to be made from not caring about someone to wanting to eat them.

Matt Haig

#66. Knowledge is finite. Wonder is infinite.

Matt Haig

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

Matt Haig

#68. 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

#69. 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

#70. There are as many versions of a book as there are readers.

Matt Haig

#71. On Earth you have to spend a lot of time traveling in between places, be it on roads or on rail tracks or in careers or relationships.

Matt Haig

#72. So this was love. Two life-forms in mutual reliance. I was meant to be thinking I was watching weakness, something to scorn, but I wasn't thinking that at all.

Matt Haig

#73. I
Like
The Way
That when you
Tilt
Poems
On their side
They
Look like
Miniature
Cities
From
A long way
Away.
Skyscrapers
Made out
Of
Words.

Matt Haig

#74. 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

#75. No two moralities match. Accept different shapes, so long as they aren't sharp enough to hurt.

Matt Haig

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

Matt Haig

#77. An annoying thing about depression is that thinking about life is inevitable. Depression makes thinkers out of all of us.

Matt Haig

#78. 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

#79. It was then I realised the one thing worse than having a dog hate you is having a dog love you.

Matt Haig

#80. Anxiety takes away all the commas and full stops we need to make sense of ourselves.

Matt Haig

#81. 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

#82. 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

#83. It is not the length of life that matters. It's the depth. But while burrowing, keep the sun above you.

Matt Haig

#84. It's dull. It's the dullest life you can imagine. Here, you have pain, and loss, that's the price. But the rewards can be wonderful, Gulliver.

Matt Haig

#85. 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

#86. 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

#87. 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

#88. 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

#89. 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

#90. Unlike a book or a film depression doesn't have to be about something.

Matt Haig

#91. I craved knowledge. I craved facts. I searched for them like lifebuoys in the sea. But statistics are tricky things.

Matt Haig

#92. Memories were just future sadness stored away

Matt Haig

#93. 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

#94. This was, I would later realise, a planet of things wrapped inside things. Food inside wrappers. Bodies inside clothes. Contempt inside smiles. Everything was hidden away.

Matt Haig

#95. So the coffee came and I tasted it - a hot, foul, acidic, dual-carbon compound liquid - and I spat it out all over her. A major breach of human etiquette: apparently, I was meant to swallow

Matt Haig

#96. History is a branch of mathematics. So is literature. Economics is a branch of religion.

Matt Haig

#97. In a thousand years, if humans survive that long, everything you know will have been disproved. And replaced by even bigger myths.

Matt Haig

#98. 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

#99. 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. Yet we have no other world to live in. And

Matt Haig

#100. The night moves at the speed of panic.

Matt Haig