Top 500 Matt Haig Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “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

452. “But there is no life where you can be in a state of sheer happiness for ever. And imagining there is just breeds more unhappiness in the life you’re in.”

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

454. “I was convinced I wasn’t made for the reality of the world. And in a way, I was right. I wasn’t made for the world. I was, like everyone, made by the world. I was made by parents and culture and TV and books and politics and school and maybe even shopping centres. So, I either needed a new me. Or a new planet. And I didn’t yet know how to find either. Which is why I felt suicidal.”

— Matt Haig

455. “Do not fall for categories. Everyone is everything. Every ingredient inside a star is inside you, and every personality that ever existed competes in the theatre of your mind for the main role.”

— Matt Haig

456. “When things are taken from us, the stuff that remains has more value. It rises not only in visibility but also intensity. What we lose in breadth we gain in depth.”

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

458. “I am a catastrophizer. I don’t simply worry. No. My worry has real ambition. My worry is limitless. My anxiety – even when I don’t have capital-A Anxiety – is big enough to go anywhere. I have always found it easy to think of the worst-case scenario and dwell on it.”

— Matt Haig

459. “For years now I had convinced myself that the sadness of the memories weighed more and lasted longer than the moments of happiness themselves. So I had, through some crude emotional mathematics, decided it was better not to seek out love or companionship or even friendship.”

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

463. “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

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

— Matt Haig

465. “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

466. “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

467. “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

468. “Which means they are born, they make some friends, eat a few meals, they get married or they don’t get married, have a child or two, or not, drink a few thousand glasses of wine, have sexual intercourse a few times, discover a lump somewhere, feel a bit of regret, wonder where all the time went, know they should have done it differently, realize they would have done it the same, and then they die.”

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

470. “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

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

— Matt Haig

472. “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

473. “For decades and decades and decades I have bemoaned people who say they feel old, but I now realise it is perfectly possible for anyone to feel old. All they need to do is become a teacher.”

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

475. “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

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

— Matt Haig

477. “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

478. “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

479. “Feeling you lack things doesn’t make you less complete.”

— Matt Haig

480. “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

481. “Sometimes depression triggers anxiety.”

— Matt Haig

482. “A happy entanglement of warm limbs and warmer love. A physical and psychological merging that conjured a kind of inner light, a bio-emotional phosphorescence that was overwhelming in its gorgeousness.”

— Matt Haig

483. “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

484. “Remember, looking at bad news doesn’t mean good news isn’t happening. It’s happening everywhere. It’s happening right now. Around the world. In hospitals, at weddings, in schools and offices and maternity wards, at airport arrival gates, in bedrooms, in inboxes, out in the street, in the kind smile of a stranger. A billion unseen wonders of everyday life.”

— Matt Haig

485. “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

486. “The truth is, you see, however much they would beg to disagree humans don’t actually like to win. Or rather, they like winning for ten seconds, but if they keep on winning, they end up actually having to think about other things, like life and death. The only thing humans like less than winning is losing, but at least something can be done about that. With absolute winning, there is nothing to be done. They just have to deal with it.”

— Matt Haig

487. “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.”

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

489. “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

490. “It is strange how close the past is, even when you imagine it to be so far away. Strange how it can just jump out of a sentence and hit you. Strange how every object or word can house a ghost.”

— Matt Haig

491. “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

492. “I feel the sheer unfathomable marvel that is this strange life we have, here on earth, the seven billion of us, clustered in our towns and cities on this pale blue dot of a planet, spending our allotted 30,000 days as best we can, in glorious insignificance.”

— Matt Haig

493. “The trouble is our lives are cluttered. The challenge is to find who we are amid the crowd of ourselves.”

— Matt Haig

494. “Beauty breeds beauty, truth triggers truth. The cure for writer’s block is therefore to read.”

— Matt Haig

495. “Start fires. But only metaphorically. Unless you are cold and it’s a safe setting. In which case: start fires.”

— Matt Haig

496. “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

497. “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. The very word ‘news’ became a joke. It was all just a cycle. A slowly rotating downward one. And your tolerance for human beings, making the same mistakes over and over and over and over again, began to fade. It was like being stuck in the same song, with a chorus you had once liked but now made you want to rip your ears off.”

— Matt Haig

498. “After reading the news, I go on Twitter. I don’t have an account but I find it interesting – all the different voices, the squabbles, the arrogance of certainty, the ignorance, the occasional, but wonderful, compassion, and watching the evolution of language head towards a new kind of hieroglyphics.”

— Matt Haig

499. “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

500. “M-am imbarbatat gandindu-ma la cateva numere prime aleatorii. Fiecare dintre ele este precum iubirea, de neimpartit, decat cu unu si cu sine insusi.”

— Matt Haig