Top 500 Matt Haig Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “That’s the thing with time, isn’t it? It’s not all the same. Some days – some years – some decades – are empty. There is nothing to them. It’s just flat water. And then you come across a year, or even a day, or an afternoon. And it is everything. It is the whole thing.”

— Matt Haig

52. “If you think something is ugly, look harder. Ugliness is just a failure of seeing.”

— Matt Haig

53. “Depression is also smaller than you. Always, it is smaller than you, even when it feels vast. It operates within you, you do not operate within it. It may be a dark cloud passing across the sky but – if that is the metaphor – you are the sky. You were there before it. And the cloud can’t exist without the sky, but the sky can exist without the cloud.”

— Matt Haig

54. “You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it.”

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

56. “You have the power to stop time. You do it by kissing. Or listening to music.”

— Matt Haig

57. “It is easier to learn to be soaked and happy than to learn how to stop the rain.”

— Matt Haig

58. “We only know what we perceive. Everything we experience is ultimately just our perception of it. “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”’ ‘You know Thoreau?”

— Matt Haig

59. “Everyone is a comedy. If people are laughing at you, they just don’t quite understand the joke that is themselves.”

— Matt Haig

60. “Living with anxiety, turning up, and doing stuff with anxiety takes a strength most people will never know.”

— Matt Haig

61. “It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out. But it is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy.”

— Matt Haig

62. “Maybe the point of life is to give up certainty and to embrace life’s beautiful uncertainty.”

— Matt Haig

63. “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

64. “Don’t be a perfectionist. Humans are imperfect. Human work is imperfect. Be less robot, more human. Be more imperfect. Evolution happens through mistakes.”

— Matt Haig

65. “Montaigne said that the point of life is to give yourself to yourself. I am trying.”

— Matt Haig

66. “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

67. “Advice for a human 86. To like something is to insult it. Love it or hate it. Be passionate. As civilisation advances, so does indifference. It is a disease. Immunize yourself with art. And love.”

— Matt Haig

68. “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

69. “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

70. “Reading is love in action.”

— Matt Haig

71. “To other people, it sometimes seems like nothing at all. You are walking around with your head on fire and no one can see the flames.”

— Matt Haig

72. “Einstein said the way to understand relativity was to imagine the difference between love and pain. “When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour.”

— Matt Haig

73. “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

74. “Where talk exists, so does hope.”

— Matt Haig

75. “So, as physical health and mental health are intertwined, couldn’t the same be said about the modern world? Couldn’t aspects of how we live in the modern world be responsible for how we feel in the modern world?”

— Matt Haig

76. “Mental health is intricately related to the whole body. And the whole body is intricately related to mental health. You can’t draw a line between a body and a mind any more than you can draw a line between oceans.”

— Matt Haig

77. “I felt the beautiful melancholy of being human, captured perfectly in the setting of a sun. Because, as with a sunset, to be human was to be in-between things; a day, bursting with desperate colour as it headed irreversibly towards night.”

— Matt Haig

78. “This is so often the way with life. You spend so much time waiting for something – a person, a feeling, a piece of information – that you can’t quite absorb it when it is in front of you. The hole is so used to being a hole it doesn’t know how to close itself.”

— Matt Haig

79. “Don’t let anyone or anything make you feel you aren’t enough.”

— Matt Haig

80. “Accept. Don’t fight things, feel them. Tension is about opposition, relaxation is about letting go.”

— Matt Haig

81. “If getting drunk was how people forgot they were mortal, then hangovers were how they remembered.”

— Matt Haig

82. “Kissing is what humans do when words have reached a place they can’t escape from.”

— Matt Haig

83. “Tragedy is just comedy that hasn’t come to fruition. One day we will laugh at this. We will laugh at everything.”

— Matt Haig

84. “I am you and you are me. We are alone, but not alone. We are trapped by time, but also infinite. Made of flesh, but also stars.”

— Matt Haig

85. “Everything is going to be all right. Or, if not, everything is going to be, so let’s not worry.”

— Matt Haig

86. “Be curious. Question everything. A present fact is just a future fiction.”

— Matt Haig

87. “When looking at triggers for mental health problems, therapists often identify an intense change in someone’s life as a major factor.”

— Matt Haig

88. “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.”

— Matt Haig

89. “You don’t need the world to understand you. It’s fine. Some people will never really understand things they haven’t experienced. Some will. Be grateful.”

— Matt Haig

90. “Why depression is hard to understand IT IS INVISIBLE. It is not “feeling a bit sad.”

— Matt Haig

91. “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

92. “Once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”

— Matt Haig

93. “There is no panacea, or utopia, there is just love and kindness and trying, amid the chaos, to make things better where we can.”

— Matt Haig

94. “Monsters are real,” Stephen King said. “And ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.”

— Matt Haig

95. “To talk about memories is to live them a little.”

— Matt Haig

96. “Every life contains many millions of decisions. Some big, some small. But every time one decision is taken over another, the outcomes differ. An irreversible variation occurs, which in turn leads to further variations.”

— Matt Haig

97. “Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies.”

— Matt Haig

98. “The more ‘success’ you get, the easier it is to be disappointed by not getting things. The only difference is that now no one feels sorry for you.”

— Matt Haig

99. “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

100. “She is smiling at me. It is a wistful smile. The kind of smile no one is capable of before the age of forty. The kind that contains sadness and defiance and amusement all at once.”

— Matt Haig