Top 500 Matt Haig Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 9 of 10

401. “The lonely mind in the busy city yearns for connection because it thinks human-to-human connection is the point of everything. But amid pure nature... solitude took on a different character. It became in itself a kind of connection. A connection between herself and the world. And between her and herself.”

— Matt Haig

402. “If you want to conquer the anxiety of life, live in the moment. Live in the breath.”

— Matt Haig

403. “There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.’ Experience surrounds innocence and innocence can never be regained once lost.”

— Matt Haig

404. “Willie Nelson once said that sometimes, you have to either write a song or you kick your foot through a window. The third option, I suppose, is that you write a book.”

— Matt Haig

405. “The world is real, but your world is subjective. Changing your perspective changes your planet.”

— Matt Haig

406. “I was convinced I wasn’t made for the reality of the world. And in a way, I was right. I wasn’t made for the world. I was, like everyone, made by the world. I was made by parents and culture and TV and books and politics and school and maybe even shopping centres. So, I either needed a new me. Or a new planet. And I didn’t yet know how to find either. Which is why I felt suicidal.”

— Matt Haig

407. “Time, I realise, is a weapon these days. Nothing weakens people like having to wait. In the street. With a knife in their hand.”

— Matt Haig

408. “Understand people are more than a social media post. Think how many conflicting thoughts you have in a day. Think of the different contradictory positions you have held in your life. Respond to online opinions but never let one rushed opinion define a whole human being. “Every one of us,” said the physicist Carl Sagan, “is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”

— Matt Haig

409. “Humans, I was discovering, believed they were in control of their own lives, and so they were in awe of questions and tests, as these made them feel like they had a certain mastery over other people, who had failed in their choices, and who had not worked hard enough on the right answers.”

— Matt Haig

410. “Talk. Listen. Encourage talking. Encourage listening. Keep adding to the conversation. Stay on the lookout for those wanting to join in the conversation. Keep reiterating, again and again, that depression is not something you ‘admit to’, it is not something you have to blush about, it is a human experience.”

— Matt Haig

411. “To see something, you have to believe in it. Really believe it. That’s the first elf rule. You can’t see something you don’t believe in. Now try your hardest and see if you can see what you have been looking for.”

— Matt Haig

412. “Be nice to other people. At the universal level, they are you.”

— Matt Haig

413. “He wrote me a prescription for more diazepam and advised I take things “one day at a time,” as if there were another way for days to be experienced.”

— Matt Haig

414. “For decades and decades and decades I have bemoaned people who say they feel old, but I now realise it is perfectly possible for anyone to feel old. All they need to do is become a teacher.”

— Matt Haig

415. “To teach feels like you are a guardian of time itself, protecting the future happiness of the world via the minds that are yet to shape it.”

— Matt Haig

416. “She would see, for instance, her mother touch my hand and say, ‘If there is such a thing as good marriage, it is because it resembles friendship rather than love.’ Or, on questioning why she looked so sad, she would remark, ‘My life has been full of terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened.’ ‘That’s Montaigne, isn’t it?”

— Matt Haig

417. “The thing with mental turmoil is that so many things that make you feel better in the short term make you feel worse in the long term. You distract yourself, when what you really need is to know yourself.”

— Matt Haig

418. “So he knew terrible things- even the most terrible things-couldn’t stop the world from turning. Life went on. And he made a promise to himself that, when he grew older, he’d try to be like his mother. Colourful, and happy and kind and full of joy.”

— Matt Haig

419. “Let’s just understand this. If we are tired or hungry or hungover, we are likely to be in a bad mood. That bad mood is therefore not really us. To believe in the things we feel at that point is wrong, because those feelings would disappear with food or sleep.”

— Matt Haig

420. “I’ve never had a coconut chilli Martini before,′ I tell him. ‘That’s the thing with getting older. You run out of new things to try.’ ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he says, still the optimist. ‘I have lived beside one ocean or another most of my life and I have yet to see the same wave twice. It’s the mana, you see. It’s everywhere. It’s never still. It keeps the world new. The whole planet is a coconut chilli Martini.”

— Matt Haig

421. “When normality becomes madness, the only way to find sanity is by daring to be different. Or daring to be the you that exists beyond all the physical clutter and mind debris of modern existence.”

— Matt Haig

422. “I have carefully calculated that the pain of me living as the bloody disaster that is myself is greater than the pain anyone else will feel if I were to die.”

— Matt Haig

423. “The problem is not that the world is a mess, but that we expect it to be otherwise.”

— Matt Haig

424. “Well, honesty gets you locked up in a psych ward.”

— Matt Haig

425. “When things are taken from us, the stuff that remains has more value. It rises not only in visibility but also intensity. What we lose in breadth we gain in depth.”

— Matt Haig

426. “No one is ever completely right about anything. Anywhere.”

— Matt Haig

427. “I was scared. I couldn’t not be. Being scared is what anxiety is all about.”

— Matt Haig

428. “The world exists in you. Your experience of the world isn’t this objective unchangeable thing called “The World.” No. Your experience of the world is your interaction with it, your interpretation of it. To a certain degree we all make our own worlds.”

— Matt Haig

429. “Her mind felt loud, like a Sturm und Drang symphony, as if the ghost of a German composer was trapped inside her mind, conjuring chaos and intensity.”

— Matt Haig

430. “There is only one genre in fiction, the genre is called book.”

— Matt Haig

431. “Shame is a shackle. Free yourself.”

— Matt Haig

432. “Books were about movement. They were about quests and journeys. Beginnings and middles and ends, even if not in that order. They were about new chapters. And leaving old ones behind.”

— Matt Haig

433. “I think life always provides reasons to not die, if we listen hard enough. Those reasons can stem from the past – the people who raised us, maybe, or friends or lovers – or from the future – the possibilities we would be switching off.”

— Matt Haig

434. “Sentimentality is another human flaw. A distortion. Another twisted by-product of love, serving no rational purpose. And yet, there was a force behind it as authentic as any other.”

— Matt Haig

435. “We have the knowledge to realise we are just a mess of quanta and particles, like everything else is, and yet we keep trying to separate ourselves from the universe we live in, to give ourselves a meaning above that of a tree or a rock or a cat or a turtle.”

— Matt Haig

436. “But we kind of know that turning life into a desperate race for more stuff is only going to shorten it. Not in years, not in terms of actual time, but in terms of how time feels.”

— Matt Haig

437. “Life is the people who love you. No one will ever choose to stay alive for an iPhone. It’s the people we reach via the iPhone that mater.”

— Matt Haig

438. “That kind of monotony that running generates – the one soundtracked by heavy breathing and the steady rhythm of feet on pavements – became a kind of metaphor for depression.”

— Matt Haig

439. “For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love. – CARL SAGAN.”

— Matt Haig

440. “Nothing fixes a thing so firmly in the memory as the wish to forget it.”

— Matt Haig

441. “I want to know if one of the reasons I sometimes feel like I am on the brink of a breakdown is partly because the world sometimes seems on the brink of a breakdown.”

— Matt Haig

442. “Peanut butter sandwiches go perfectly well with a glass of white wine. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”

— Matt Haig

443. “But there is no life where you can be in a state of sheer happiness for ever. And imagining there is just breeds more unhappiness in the life you’re in.”

— Matt Haig

444. “FIRE Every part of her That changed That got scraped off Because of schoolyard laughter Or the advice of grown-ups Long gone – And the pain of friends Already dead. She collected those bits off the floor. Like wood shavings. And she made them into fuel. Into fire. And burned. Bright enough to see for ever.”

— Matt Haig

445. “For years now I had convinced myself that the sadness of the memories weighed more and lasted longer than the moments of happiness themselves. So I had, through some crude emotional mathematics, decided it was better not to seek out love or companionship or even friendship.”

— Matt Haig

446. “I am a catastrophizer. I don’t simply worry. No. My worry has real ambition. My worry is limitless. My anxiety – even when I don’t have capital-A Anxiety – is big enough to go anywhere. I have always found it easy to think of the worst-case scenario and dwell on it.”

— Matt Haig

447. “Some humans not only liked violence, but craved it, I realised. Not because they wanted pain, but because they already had pain and wanted to be distracted away from that kind of pain with a lesser kind.”

— Matt Haig

448. “We can think about anything. And so it makes sense that we end up sometimes thinking about everything. We might have to, sometimes, be brave enough to switch the screens off in order to switch ourselves back on. To disconnect in order to reconnect.”

— Matt Haig

449. “To enjoy life, we might have to stop thinking about what we will never be able to read and watch and say and 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. To not crave parallel lives. To find a smaller mathematics. To be a proud and singular one. An indivisible prime.”

— Matt Haig

450. “Suddenly it made me realize why religion was such a big thing around here. Because, yes, sure, God could not exist. But then neither could humans. So if they believed in themselves – the logic must go – why not believe in something that was only a fraction more unlikely?”

— Matt Haig