Top 500 Matt Haig Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “Every move had been a mistake, every decision a disaster, every day a retreat from who she’d imagined she’d be.”

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

453. “Well, honesty gets you locked up in a psych ward.”

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

455. “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

456. “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

457. “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

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

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

460. “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

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

— Matt Haig

462. “Familiarity could make you a stranger to yourself.”

— Matt Haig

463. “Life is the people who love you. No one will ever choose to stay alive for an iPhone. It’s the people we reach via the iPhone that mater.”

— Matt Haig

464. “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

465. “Much of gossip is envy in disguise, Much of self-doubt is conformity in disguise.”

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

467. “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

468. “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

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

— Matt Haig

470. “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

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

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

473. “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

474. “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

475. “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

476. “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

477. “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

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

— Matt Haig

479. “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

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

— Matt Haig

481. “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

482. “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

483. “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

484. “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

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

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

487. “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

488. “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

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

— Matt Haig

490. “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

491. “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

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

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

494. “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

495. “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

496. “And for three weeks I was trapped in my own mind again. But this time, I had weapons. One of them, maybe the most important, was this knowledge: I have been ill before, then well again. Wellness is possible.”

— Matt Haig

497. “This particular type of road was a motorway. A motorway is the most advanced type of road there is, which as with most forms of human advancement essentially meant accidental death was considerably more probable.”

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

499. “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

500. “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