Top 500 Matt Haig Quotes (2025 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. “You make the wrong decision in the present and it haunts you, just as the Treaty of Versaillles in nineteen nineteen sowed the ground for Hitler to take power in nineteen thirty-three, so every present moment is paying for a future one. Just one wrong turn can get you very lost. What you do in the present stays with you. It comes back. You don’t get away with anything.”

— Matt Haig

304. “To be human was to continually dumb the world down into an understandable story that keeps things simple.”

— 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. “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

307. “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

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. “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

310. “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

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

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

314. “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

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

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

318. “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

319. “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

320. “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

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

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

323. “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

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

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

326. “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

327. “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

328. “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

329. “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

330. “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

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

— Matt Haig

332. “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

333. “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

334. “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

335. “The hardest question I have ever been asked is: ‘How do I stay alive for other people if I have no one?’ The answer is that you stay alive for other versions of you. For the people you will meet, yes, sure, but also the people you will be.”

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

337. “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

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

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

340. “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

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

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

343. “It is better to be a sad poem than a blank page.”

— Matt Haig

344. “If you aim to be something you are not, you will always fail. Aim to be you.”

— Matt Haig

345. “The weird thing about depression is that, even though you might have more suicidal thoughts, the fear of death remains the same.”

— Matt Haig

346. “The sense of being physically empty, of dissolving, of being a ghost whose existence was sourced by electric anxiety. And it became hard to breathe. The air thinned. It took massive concentration just to keep control of my breathing.”

— Matt Haig

347. “Never say ‘pull yourself together’ or ‘cheer up’ unless you’re also going to provide detailed, foolproof instructions.”

— Matt Haig

348. “Travel makes one modest” said Gustave Flaubert. “You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” Such a perspective can be liberating. Especially when you have an illness that may on one hand lower self-esteem but on the other intensifies the trivial.”

— Matt Haig

349. “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.”

— Matt Haig

350. “Human beings, as a rule, simply don’t accept things that don’t fit their worldview.”

— Matt Haig