Top 500 Matt Haig Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 4 of 10

151. “The universe tended towards chaos and entropy. That was basic thermodynamics. Maybe it was basic existence too.”

— Matt Haig

152. “Just because you can, it doesn’t mean you should. There is a power and a beauty in unproved conjectures, unkissed lips and unpicked flowers.”

— Matt Haig

153. “So long as there are still books on the shelves, you are never trapped. Every book is a potential escape.”

— Matt Haig

154. “The sky, like the sea, can anchor us. It says: hey, it’s okay, there is something bigger than your life that you are part of, and it’s – literally – cosmic.”

— Matt Haig

155. “Places don’t matter to people any more. Places aren’t the point. People are only ever half present where they are these days. They always have at least one foot in the great digital nowhere.”

— Matt Haig

156. “The most powerful moment in life is when you decide not to be scared anymore.”

— Matt Haig

157. “Remember that the key thing about life on earth is change. Cars rust. Paper yellows. Technology dates. Caterpillars become butterflies. Nights morph into days. Depression lifts.”

— Matt Haig

158. “Obey your head. Obey your heart. Obey your gut. In fact, obey everything except commands.”

— Matt Haig

159. “End-users not technologies shape the market. Consequently marketers need to stay abreast not only of technological developments but also of the way people respond to them.”

— Matt Haig

160. “An online profile of your best friend is not your best friend. A status update about a day in the park is not a day in the park. And the desire to tell the world about how happy you are, is not how happy you are.”

— Matt Haig

161. “A reminder for the tough times One day this will be over. And we will be grateful for life in ways we never felt possible before.”

— Matt Haig

162. “Facebook is where everyone lies to their friends. Twitter is where they tell the truth to strangers.”

— Matt Haig

163. “You cannot know the future. You look at the news and it looks terrifying. But you can never be sure. That is the whole thing with the future. You don’t know. At some point you have to accept that you don’t know. You have to stop flicking ahead and just concentrate on the page you are on.”

— Matt Haig

164. “I used to worry about fitting in until I realized the reason I didn’t fit in was because I didn’t want to.”

— Matt Haig

165. “There is this idea that you either read to escape or you read to find yourself. I don’t really see the difference. We find ourselves through the process of escaping. It is not where we are, but where we want to go, and all that. “Is there no way out of the mind?” Sylvia Plath famously asked.”

— Matt Haig

166. “Don’t always try to be cool. The whole universe is cool. It’s the warm bits that matter.”

— Matt Haig

167. “The key to happiness wasn’t being yourself, because what did that even mean? Everyone had many selves. No. The key to happiness is finding the lie that suits you best.”

— Matt Haig

168. “New technology, on Earth, just means something you will laugh at in five years. Value the stuff you won’t laugh at in five years. Like love. Or a good poem. Or a song. Or the sky.”

— Matt Haig

169. “Humans, as a rule, don’t like mad people unless they are good at painting, and only then once they are dead.”

— Matt Haig

170. “The craving for the thing is rarely met by the satisfaction of getting it. And so we crave more. And the cycle repeats. We are encouraged to want what will only make us want more. We are, in short, encouraged to be addicts.”

— Matt Haig

171. “As Thoreau wrote, ‘It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”

— Matt Haig

172. “She was a waterfall of apologies. She was drowning in herself.”

— Matt Haig

173. “Grief is terror, in its most undiluted form.”

— Matt Haig

174. “She just needed potential. And she was nothing if not potential. She wondered why she had never seen it before. She heard Mrs Elm’s voice, from under the table somewhere far behind her, cutting through the noise. ‘Don’t give up! Don’t you dare give up, Nora Seed!’ She didn’t want to die. And she didn’t want to live any other life than the one that was hers.”

— Matt Haig

175. “But while choice is infinite, our lives have time spans. We can’t live every life. We can’t watch every film or read every book or visit every single place on this sweet earth. Rather than being blocked by it, we need to edit the choice in front of us. We need to find out what is good for us, and leave the rest. We don’t need another world. Everything we need is here, if we give up thinking we need everything.”

— Matt Haig

176. “And even if you were a pawn – maybe we all are – then you should remember that a pawn is the most magical piece of all. It might look small and ordinary but it isn’t. Because a pawn is never just a pawn. A pawn is a queen-in-waiting. All you need to do is find a way to keep moving forward.”

— Matt Haig

177. “You’ll be cool when you’re dead.”

— Matt Haig

178. “The possibility of pain is where love stems from.”

— Matt Haig

179. “A world full of people hating themselves is not a happy world. Buddhism does not seem to be about self-punishment. A key buddhist symbol is that of the lotus flower. The lotus flower grows in mud at the bottom of a pool, but rises above the murky water and blooms in the clear air, pure and beautiful, before eventually dying. This metaphor for spiritual enlightenment also works as a metaphor for hope and change.”

— Matt Haig

180. “But it only takes a doubt. A drop of ink falls into a clear glass of water and clouds the whole thing. So the moment after I realised I wasn’t perfectly well was the moment I realised I was still very ill indeed.”

— Matt Haig

181. “Hate is a pointless emotion to have inside you. It is like eating a scorpion to punish it for stinging you.”

— Matt Haig

182. “People place so much value on thought, but feeling is as essential. I want to read books that make me laugh and cry and fear and hope and punch the air in triumph. I want a book to hug me or grab me by the scruff of my neck. I don’t even mind if it punches me in the gut. Because we are here to feel.”

— Matt Haig

183. “You need to feel life’s terror to feel its wonder.”

— Matt Haig

184. “HAPPINESS IS NOT good for the economy. We are encouraged, continually, to be a little bit dissatisfied with ourselves. Our bodies are too fat, or too thin, or too saggy. Our skin is expected to have the right ‘sun-kissed glow’, or the.”

— Matt Haig

185. “Words don’t capture, they release.”

— Matt Haig

186. “Think of how detached we are from nature. How we have to do so much to it before we can bottle it and put the name ‘wild’ on it.”

— Matt Haig

187. “Don’t aim for perfection. Evolution, and life, only happen through mistakes.”

— Matt Haig

188. “Flowers, after love, must have been the best advert planet Earth had going for it.”

— Matt Haig

189. “You get up. You put on your clothes. And then you put on your personality. Choose wisely.”

— Matt Haig

190. “Employment is becoming a dehumanizing process, as if humans existed to serve work, rather than work to serve humans.”

— Matt Haig

191. “If someone loves you, let them. Believe in that love. Live for them, even when you feel there is no point.”

— Matt Haig

192. “Basically, the key rule is, if you want to appear sane on Earth you have to be in the right place, wearing the right clothes, saying the right things, and only stepping on the right kind of grass.”

— Matt Haig

193. “I understand that the way you stop time is by stopping being ruled by it. I am no longer drowning in my past, or fearful of my future. How can I be? The future is you.”

— Matt Haig

194. “Life is like a chimney – you sometimes have to get through the dark before you see the light.”

— Matt Haig

195. “Nora went through her social media. No messages, no comments, no new followers, no friend requests. She was antimatter, with added self-pity.”

— Matt Haig

196. “You will regret the fear. In The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, Bronnie Ware–a nurse who worked in palliative care–shared her experience of talking to those near the end of their lives. Far and away the biggest regret they had was fear. Many of Bronnie’s patients were in deep anguish that they had spent their whole lives worrying. Lives consumed by fear. Worrying what other people thought of them. A worry that had stopped them being true to themselves.”

— Matt Haig

197. “Forever, Emily Dickinson said, is composed of nows. But how do you inhabit the now you are in? How do you stop the ghosts of all the other nows from getting in? How, in short, do you live?”

— Matt Haig

198. “Ignore idiots with narrow definitions od beauty. They are blind to life’s imperfect wonder.”

— Matt Haig

199. “Pain is a debt paid off with time.”

— Matt Haig

200. “Want,’ she told her, in a measured tone, ’is an interesting word. It means lack. Sometimes if we fill that lack with something else the original want disappears entirely. Maybe you have a lack problem rather than a want problem. Maybe there is a life that you really want to live.”

— Matt Haig