Top 500 Matt Haig Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “Well, honesty gets you locked up in a psych ward.”

— Matt Haig

452. “Mornings were hard on Earth. You woke up tireder than when you went to sleep. Your back ached. Your neck ached. Your chest felt tight with anxiety that came from being mortal. And then, on top of all that, you had to do so much before the day even started. The main problem was the stuff to do in order to be presentable.”

— Matt Haig

453. “You have to stop flicking ahead and just concentrate on the page you’re on.”

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

455. “Misery, like yoga, is not a competitive sport.”

— Matt Haig

456. “Her mind felt loud, like a Sturm und Drang symphony, as if the ghost of a German composer was trapped inside her mind, conjuring chaos and intensity.”

— Matt Haig

457. “Love was trapping me here.”

— Matt Haig

458. “And by noticing how modern life makes us feel, by allowing that reality and by being broad-minded enough to change when change is healthy, we can engage with this beautiful world without being worried it will steal who we are.”

— Matt Haig

459. “Every move had been a mistake, every decision a disaster, every day a retreat from who she’d imagined she’d be.”

— Matt Haig

460. “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

461. “Dads are just men who have babies but I know he loved me because I felt it go out of me when he crashed. It was like air or blood or bones or something that made me me and it wasnt there any more and I had only half of it now and I didn’t know if that was enough.”

— Matt Haig

462. “It was a familiar feeling. This feeling of being incomplete in just about every sense. An unfinished jigsaw of a human. Incomplete living and incomplete dying.”

— Matt Haig

463. “History is a branch of mathematics. So is literature. Economics is a branch of religion.”

— Matt Haig

464. “Nothing fixes a thing so firmly in the memory as the wish to forget it.”

— Matt Haig

465. “Don’t let anonymity turn you into someone you would be ashamed to be offline. Be a mystery, not a demographic. Be someone a computer could never quite know. Keep empathy alive. Break patterns. Resist robotic tendencies. Stay human.”

— Matt Haig

466. “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.”

— Matt Haig

467. “One thing that has remained constant, across four centuries, has been the desire for a British person to fill a silence with talk of the weather, and whenever I have lived there I was no exception to this rule.”

— Matt Haig

468. “It may be a dark cloud passing across the sky, but – if that is the metaphor – you are the sky.”

— Matt Haig

469. “She had loved no one, and no one had loved her back. She had been empty, her life had been empty, walking around, faking some kind of human normality like a sentient mannequin of despair. Just the bare bones of getting through.”

— Matt Haig

470. “Anxiety takes away all the commas and full stops we need to make sense of ourselves.”

— Matt Haig

471. “When I am in a room with People,” he wrote, “if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes home to myself: but the identity of everyone in the room begins to press upon me so that I am in a very little time annihilated.”

— Matt Haig

472. “In your mind, change the name of every day to Saturday. And change the name of work to play.”

— Matt Haig

473. “A cow is a cow even if you call it beef.”

— Matt Haig

474. “Depression for me was total exposure. A red-raw, naked mind. A skinned personality. A brain in a jar full of the acid that is experience. I’m not talking about all that What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger stuff. No. That’s simply not true. What doesn’t kill you very often makes you weaker. What doesn’t kill you can leave you limping for the rest of your life.”

— Matt Haig

475. “The whole of consumerism is based on us wanting the next thing rather than the present thing we already have. This is an almost perfect recipe for unhappiness.”

— Matt Haig

476. “There is no right or wrong way to have depression, or to have a panic attack, or to feel suicidal.”

— Matt Haig

477. “Anxiety,’ Kierkegaard wrote, in the middle of the nineteenth century, ’is the dizziness of freedom.”

— Matt Haig

478. “I find that being grimly aware of mortality can make me steadfastly determined to enjoy life where life can be enjoyed. It makes me value precious moments with my children, and with the woman I love. It adds intensity in bad ways, but also good ways.”

— Matt Haig

479. “So why do we bother with love? No matter how much we love someone we are never going to make them, or ourselves, free of pain.”

— Matt Haig

480. “Peace was made of porcelain, as it always was.”

— Matt Haig

481. “In California the only way to look like you are getting older is to look like you are getting younger... if you can move your forehead over the age of forty, then people become very suspicious.”

— Matt Haig

482. “There are billions of different versions of an older you. There is one version of the present you.”

— Matt Haig

483. “Friend: Someone who will tell you the truth, often mistaken for an enemy.”

— Matt Haig

484. “And I walked across the gravel, towards the road and somewhere in the universe of my soul a fiery, life-giving star collapsed, and a very black hole began to form.”

— Matt Haig

485. “FIRE Every part of her That changed That got scraped off Because of schoolyard laughter Or the advice of grown-ups Long gone – And the pain of friends Already dead. She collected those bits off the floor. Like wood shavings. And she made them into fuel. Into fire. And burned. Bright enough to see for ever.”

— Matt Haig

486. “A wave can kill you. Or you can ride it. It’s sometimes more dangerous to shy away. You can’t live your life in fear. You have to be prepared to get on your board and stand on your feet. If you are in the barrel of a wave you have to ignore the fear. You have to be in that moment. You have to carve on through. You get scared, and the next thing you know you are off your board and smashing your head on a rock. I’m never going to live in fear.”

— Matt Haig

487. “Never let a stranger’s negative opinion of you become your own negative opinion of you.”

— Matt Haig

488. “As civilisation advances, so does indifference.”

— Matt Haig

489. “Because words are a magic too, and they can contain everything.”

— Matt Haig

490. “Another thing. Stimulation. Excitement. The kinds found in new places. Sometimes this can be terrifying, but it can also be liberating. In a familiar place, your mind focuses solely on itself. There is nothing new it needs to notice about your bedroom. No potential external threats, just internal ones. By forcing yourself into a new physical space, preferably in a different country, you end up inevitably focusing a bit more on the world outside your head.”

— Matt Haig

491. “And when a joke is powerful enough, you don’t laugh, you scream. Yes, when the mask slips you scream out loud for all the terror in the world, and I screamed then.”

— Matt Haig

492. “If the modern world is making us feel bad, then it doesn’t matter what else we have going for us, because feeling bad sucks.”

— Matt Haig

493. “When it comes to our minds, awareness is very often the solution itself.”

— Matt Haig

494. “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

495. “Read Emily Dickinson. Read Graham Greene. Read Italo Calvino. Read Maya Angelou. Read anything you want. Just read. Books are possibilities. They are Escape Routes. They give you options when you have none. Each one can be a home for an uprooted mind.”

— Matt Haig

496. “I pick it up and turn to a random page and read a sentence – ‘Nothing fixes a thing so firmly in the memory as the wish to forget it’.”

— Matt Haig

497. “Are you someone who watches life, or someone who participates?”

— Matt Haig

498. “To say how I was feeling would lead to feeling more of what I was feeling.”

— Matt Haig

499. “The lesson of history is that ignorance and superstition are things that can rise up, inside almost anyone, at any moment. And what starts as a doubt in a mind can swiftly become an act in the world.”

— Matt Haig

500. “That is the biggest paradox, I think, about the modern world. We are all connected to each other but we often feel shut out. The increasing overload and complexity of modern life can be isolating.”

— Matt Haig