Top 500 Matt Haig Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Monsters are real,” Stephen King said. “And ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.”

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

106. “In order to get over a problem it helps to look at it. You can’t climb a mountain that you pretend isn’t there.”

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

108. “Sometimes, to be yourself you will have to forget yourself and become something else. Your character is not a fixed thing. You will sometimes have to move to keep up with it.”

— Matt Haig

109. “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

110. “As Hamlet said to Rosencrantz, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

— Matt Haig

111. “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

112. “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

113. “I want life. I want to read it and write it and feel it and live it. I want, for as much of the time as possible in this blink-of-an-eye existence we have, to feel all that can be felt.”

— Matt Haig

114. “The rook is my favourite piece,’ she said. ‘It’s the one that you think you don’t have to watch out for. It is straightforward. You keep your eye on the queen, and the knights, and the bishop, because they are the sneaky ones. But it’s the rook that often gets you. The straightforward is never quite what it seems.”

— Matt Haig

115. “That is how science works, not through blind faith, but continual doubt.”

— Matt Haig

116. “You can’t change the past. You can’t change other people. You can change you though. You narrate this story. So start to write a new chapter.”

— Matt Haig

117. “He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.”

— Matt Haig

118. “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams,’ Thoreau had said. ‘Live the life you’ve imagined.”

— Matt Haig

119. “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

120. “Medication is an incredibly attractive concept. Not just for the person with depression, or the person running a pharmaceutical firm, but for society as a whole. It underlines the idea we have hammered into us by the hundred thousand TV ads we have seen that everything can be fixed by consuming things.”

— Matt Haig

121. “Don’t say yes to things you wish you had the confidence to say no to.”

— Matt Haig

122. “Let’s not forget The Things They Do To Make Themselves Happy That Actually Make Them Miserable. This is an infinite list. It includes – shopping, watching TV, taking the better job, getting the bigger house, writing a semi-autobiographical novel, educating their young, making their skin look mildly less old and harboring a vague desire to believe there might be a meaning to it all.”

— Matt Haig

123. “The weird thing about depression is that, even though you might have more suicidal thoughts, the fear of death remains the same. The only difference is that the pain of life has rapidly increased. So when you hear about someone killing themselves it’s important to know that death wasn’t any less scary for them. It wasn’t a ‘choice’ in the moral sense. To be moralistic about it is to misunderstand.”

— Matt Haig

124. “To enjoy life, we might have to stop thinking about what we will never be able to do, and start to think of how to enjoy the world within our boundaries. To live on a human scale. To focus on the few things we can do, rather than the millions of things we can’t.”

— Matt Haig

125. “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

126. “Fish get depressed when they have a lack of stimulation. A lack of everything. When they are just there, floating in a tank that resembles nothing at all.”

— Matt Haig

127. “Yet people still don’t think depression really that bad. If they did, they wouldn’t say the things they say.”

— Matt Haig

128. “Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. Now, you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend. Bruce Lee.”

— Matt Haig

129. “There comes a point at which you have to face it. To face yourself. In a world of a million distractions you are still left with only one mind.”

— Matt Haig

130. “You are not other people. You are you. You have no control over other people. You have no absolute control over what they think of the world or of politics or of you. You have no control over what harm they may have done. Even if the harm they have done is to you.”

— Matt Haig

131. “Keep risking ridicule.”

— Matt Haig

132. “You don’t have to be positive. You don’t have to feel guilty about fear or sadness or anger. You don’t stop the rain by telling it to stop. Sometimes you just have to let it pour, let it soak you to your skin. It never rains forever. And know that, however wet you get, you are not the rain. You are not the bad feelings in your head. You are the person experiencing the storm.”

— Matt Haig

133. “Never underestimate the big importance of small things.”

— Matt Haig

134. “We are always bigger than the pain we feel. Always. The pain is not total. When you say “I am in pain,” there is the pain and there is the I but the I is always bigger than the pain. Because the I is there even without the pain, while the pain is only there as a product of that I. And that I will survive and go on to feel other things.”

— Matt Haig

135. “So often, reading is seen as important because of its social value. It is tied to education and the economy and so on. But that misses the whole point of reading. Reading isn’t important because it helps to get you a job. It’s important because it gives you room to exist beyond the reality you’re given. It is how humans merge; how minds connect. Dreams, empathy, understanding, escape.”

— Matt Haig

136. “Humans are ruled by their basic desires and this leads to suffering and pain, because our desires make us crave things from the world but the world is nothing but representation.”

— Matt Haig

137. “Don’t absorb criticism from people you wouldn’t go to for advice.”

— Matt Haig

138. “The object of art is to give life a shape,’ said Shakespeare. And my life –and my mess of a mind –needed shape. I had ‘lost the plot’. There was no linear narrative of me. There was just mess and chaos. So yes, I loved external narratives for the hope they offered. Films. TV dramas. And most of all, books. They were, in and of themselves, reasons to stay alive. Every book written is the product of a human mind in a particular state. Add all the books together and you get the end sum of humanity.”

— Matt Haig

139. “It’s okay to be the teacup with a chip in it. That’s the one with a story.”

— Matt Haig

140. “Don’t worry about things you can’t control. The news is full of things you can’t do anything about. Do the things you can do stuff about – raise awareness of issues that concern you, give whatever you can to whichever cause you feel passionate about, and also accept the things you can’t do.”

— Matt Haig

141. “That was the familiar lesson of time. Everything changes and nothing changes.”

— Matt Haig

142. “But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself. – Albert Camus, A Happy Death.”

— Matt Haig

143. “Three in the morning is never the time to try and sort out your life.”

— Matt Haig

144. “But she’d been feeling lonely. And though she’d studied enough existential philosophy to believe loneliness was a fundamental part of being a human in an essentially meaningless universe, it was good to see him.”

— Matt Haig

145. “Do you ever think ‘how did I end up here?’ Like you are in a maze and totally lost and it’s all your fault because you were the one who made every turn?”

— Matt Haig

146. “To want is to lack. That is what it means.”

— Matt Haig

147. “She realised that you could be as honest as possible in life, but people only see the truth if it is close enough to their reality.”

— Matt Haig

148. “The paradox of modern life is this: we have never been more connected and we have never been more alone.”

— Matt Haig

149. “Don’t ever be afraid of telling someone you love them. There are things wrong with your world, but an excess of love is not one.”

— Matt Haig

150. “You can have everything and feel nothing.”

— Matt Haig