Top 500 Matt Haig Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “If the stone falls hard enough the ripples last a lifetime.”

— Matt Haig

302. “It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn’t make and the work we didn’t do and the people we didn’t marry and the children we didn’t have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the kens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, as infinitum, until our time runs out.”

— Matt Haig

303. “To be healthy meant to be covered. Clothed. Literally and metaphorically.”

— Matt Haig

304. “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

305. “A quark is not the smallest thing. The smallest thing is the regret you will feel on your deathbed for not having worked more.”

— Matt Haig

306. “I think that basically we are all helping people. All the time. Every time any of us speaks openly about mental health, we are helping normalize an illness that is still handled with protective goggles and safety gloves.”

— Matt Haig

307. “We often find ourselves wishing for more hours in the day, but that wouldn’t help anything. The problem, clearly, isn’t that we have a shortage of time. It’s more that we have an overload of everything else.”

— Matt Haig

308. “You are not the most intelligent creature in the universe. You are not even the most intelligent creature on your planet. The tonal language in the song of a humpback whale displays more complexity than the entire works of Shakespeare. It is not a competition. Well, it is. But don’t worry about it.”

— Matt Haig

309. “Life can sometimes feel like an overproduced song, with a cacophony of a hundred instruments playing all at once. Sometimes the song sounds better stripped back to just a guitar and a voice. Sometimes, when a song has too much happening, it’s hard to hear the song at all.”

— Matt Haig

310. “If you’re feeling mentally unwell, treat yourself as you would a physical problem.”

— Matt Haig

311. “School is a joke. But go along with it, because you are very near to the punchline.”

— Matt Haig

312. “In a familiar place, your mind focuses solely on itself.”

— Matt Haig

313. “She realised that she hadn’t tried to end her life because she was miserable, but because she had managed to convince herself that there was no way out of her misery. That, she supposed, was the basis of depression as well as the difference between fear and despair. Fear was when you wandered into a cellar and worried that the door would close shut. Despair was when the door closed and locked behind you.”

— Matt Haig

314. “So, as was often the case, a big fear was beaten by a bigger fear. The best way to beat a monster is to find a scarier one.”

— Matt Haig

315. “It may seem strange, falling in love with someone because of a gesture, but sometimes you can read an entire person in a single moment. The way you study a grain of sand and understand the universe. Love at first sight might or might not be a thing, but love in a single moment is.”

— Matt Haig

316. “Perhaps a wish was just a hope with better aim.”

— Matt Haig

317. “You understand quite completely that the main lesson of history is: humans don’t learn from history. The twenty-first century could still turn out to be a bad cover version of the twentieth, but what could we do? People’s minds across the world were filling with utopias that could never overlap. It was a recipe for disaster, but, alas, a familiar one. Empathy was waning, as it often had. Peace was made of porcelain, as it always was.”

— Matt Haig

318. “You arrived, with baby feet and hands and infinite happiness, and then the happiness slowly evaporated as your feet and hands grew bigger.”

— Matt Haig

319. “I was drinking a cup of tea. I actually enjoyed tea. It was so much better than coffee. It tasted like comfort.”

— Matt Haig

320. “There is no shame in not watching news. There is no shame in not going on Twitter. There is no shame in disconnecting.”

— Matt Haig

321. “Imagine all the time we had was bottled up, like wine. and handed over to us. How would we make that bottle last? By sipping slowly, appreciating the taste, or by gulping?”

— Matt Haig

322. “One thing mental illness taught me is that progress is a matter of acceptance. Only by accepting a situation can you change it. You have to learn not to be shocked by the shock. Not to be in a state of panic about the panic. To change what you can change and not get frustrated by what you can’t.”

— Matt Haig

323. “Sadness seemed to me like a disease, and I worried it was contagious.”

— Matt Haig

324. “The way out is never through yourself.”

— Matt Haig

325. “Doing one thing differently is often the same as doing everything differently. Actions can’t be reversed within a lifetime, however much we try.”

— Matt Haig

326. “Thomas Hobbes had viewed memory and imagination as pretty much the same thing, and since discovering that she had never entirely trusted her memories.”

— Matt Haig

327. “A sore throat doesn’t become less sore simply because you’ve felt it before.”

— Matt Haig

328. “Music doesn’t get in. Music is already in. Music simply uncovers what is there, makes you feel emotions that you didn’t necessarily know you had inside you, and runs around waking them all up. A rebirth of sorts.”

— Matt Haig

329. “If God exists, what is He but a mathematician?”

— Matt Haig

330. “Illness has a lot to teach wellness. But when I am ill I forget these things. The trick is to keep hold of that knowledge. To turn recovery into prevention. To live how I live when I am ill, without being ill.”

— Matt Haig

331. “I don’t think your problem was stage fright. Or wedding fright. I think your problem was life fright.”

— Matt Haig

332. “What sometimes feels like a trap is actually just a trick of the mind. She didn’t need a vineyard or a Californian sunset to be happy. She didn’t even need a large house and the perfect family. She just needed potential. And she was nothing if not potential. She wondered why she had never seen it before.”

— Matt Haig

333. “She imagined, now, what it would be like to accept herself completely. Every mistake she had ever made. Every mark on her body. Every dream she hadn’t reached or pain she had felt. Every lust or longing she had suppressed.”

— Matt Haig

334. “Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything it is because we are dangerously near to wanting nothing.’ – Sylvia Plath.”

— Matt Haig

335. “The hardest dream of all is the dream of not being tormented by our unlived dreams. To cope with and accept unfulfillment as a natural human condition. To be complete in our incompleteness. To be free from the shackles of memory, and ambition, to be free from comparison to other people and other hypothetical selves, and to meet the moment without any other agenda, to exist as freely as time itself.”

— Matt Haig

336. “You need to learn the art of discretion. Of speaking about a thing without actually speaking of it. Truth is a straight line you sometimes need to curve,-.”

— Matt Haig

337. “Don’t worry about being angry. Worry when being angry becomes impossible. Because then you have been consumed.”

— Matt Haig

338. “One frustration with anxiety is that it is often hard to find a reason behind it. There may be no visible threat and yet you can feel utterly terrorized.”

— Matt Haig

339. “No two moralities match. Accept different shapes, so long as they aren’t sharp enough to hurt.”

— Matt Haig

340. “If pills work for you it doesn’t really matter if this is to do with serotonin or another process or anything else.- keep taking them. Hell, if licking wallpaper does it for you, do that. I am not anti pill. I am pro anything that works and I know pill do work for a lot of people.”

— Matt Haig

341. “From the outside a person sees your physical form, sees that you are a unified mass of atoms and cells. Yet inside you feel like a Big Bang has happened. You feel lost, disintegrated, spread across the universe amid infinite dark space.”

— Matt Haig

342. “Confine your imagination. Do not lose yourself to dangerous daydreams. Do not sit and ponder and dwell on a life you are not living. Do something active. Exercise. Work harder. Answer your emails. Fill your diary with harmless social activities. By doing, we stop ourselves imagining. And imagining for us is a fast-moving car heading toward a cliff.”

— Matt Haig

343. “The art of swimming... was about purity. The more focused you were on the activity, the less focused you were on everything else. You kind of stopped being you and became the thing you were doing.”

— Matt Haig

344. “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.”

— Matt Haig

345. “It’ hard to explain depression to people who haven’t suffered from it. It is like explaining life on Earth to an alien. The reference points just aren’t there. You have to resort to metaphors.”

— Matt Haig

346. “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. Invisible sharks One frustration with anxiety is that it is often hard to find a reason behind it.”

— Matt Haig

347. “Actions create reactions. When things start to happen, other things start to happen. But sometimes it seems there is no explanation as to why the things are happening – why all the buses are coming along at once – why life’s moments of luck and pain arrive in clusters. All we can do is observe the pattern, the rhythm, and then live it.”

— Matt Haig

348. “Because life is frightening, and it is frightening for a reason, and the reason is that it doesn’t matter which branch of a life we get to live, we are always the same rotten tree.”

— Matt Haig

349. “I sometimes feel like my head is a computer with too many windows open.”

— Matt Haig

350. “The past is never gone. It just hides.”

— Matt Haig