Top 500 Matt Haig Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “A kiss,′ she said, ’is like music. It stops time...”

— Matt Haig

402. “Compassion is the basis of morality,’ the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer had written, in one of his softer moments. Maybe it was the basis of life too.”

— Matt Haig

403. “It can drive you insane, thinking of all the other lives we don’t live.”

— Matt Haig

404. “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

405. “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

406. “It occurred to me that human beings didn’t live beyond a hundred because they simply weren’t up for it. Psychologically, I mean. You kind of ran out. There wasn’t enough self to keep going. You grew too bored of your own mind.”

— Matt Haig

407. “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

408. “If you’re feeling bad about yourself, stay away from Instagram.”

— Matt Haig

409. “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

410. “People are craving not just physical space but the space to be mentally free. A space from unwanted distracted thoughts that clutter our heads like pop-up advertising of the mind in an already frantic world. And that space is still there to be found. It’s just that we can’t rely on it. We have to consciously seek it out.”

— Matt Haig

411. “The quiet made her realize how much noise there was elsewhere in the world. Here, noise had meaning. You heard something and you had to pay attention.”

— Matt Haig

412. “Be a mystery, not a demographic. Be someone a computer could never quite know.”

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

414. “I’ve let people down. I haven’t always been easy. I’ve done things I regret. I was a bad wife. Not always a good mother, either. People have given up a little on me, and I don’t entirely blame them.”

— Matt Haig

415. “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

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

— Matt Haig

417. “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

418. “Life begins,’ Sartre once wrote, ’on the other side of despair.”

— Matt Haig

419. “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

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

— Matt Haig

421. “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

422. “There comes a time when the only way to start living is to tell the truth. To be who you really are, even if it is dangerous.”

— Matt Haig

423. “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

424. “Love was trapping me here.”

— Matt Haig

425. “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

426. “You see, his mother has thrown me out of the house because I was unfaithful to her. Or rather the faith I had wasn’t the right kind. Given the absence of mind-reading technology, humans believe monogamy is possible.”

— Matt Haig

427. “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

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

— Matt Haig

429. “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

430. “Every book written is the product of a human mind in a particular state.”

— Matt Haig

431. “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

432. “Mornings were hard on Earth. You woke up tireder than when you went to sleep. Your back ached. Your neck ached. Your chest felt tight with anxiety that came from being mortal. And then, on top of all that, you had to do so much before the day even started. The main problem was the stuff to do in order to be presentable.”

— Matt Haig

433. “And by noticing how modern life makes us feel, by allowing that reality and by being broad-minded enough to change when change is healthy, we can engage with this beautiful world without being worried it will steal who we are.”

— Matt Haig

434. “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

435. “It was a familiar feeling. This feeling of being incomplete in just about every sense. An unfinished jigsaw of a human. Incomplete living and incomplete dying.”

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

437. “Mental wellbeing counts as much as physical wellbeing – indeed, it is part of physical wellbeing.”

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

439. “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

440. “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

441. “History is a branch of mathematics. So is literature. Economics is a branch of religion.”

— Matt Haig

442. “She had loved no one, and no one had loved her back. She had been empty, her life had been empty, walking around, faking some kind of human normality like a sentient mannequin of despair. Just the bare bones of getting through.”

— Matt Haig

443. “There is no right or wrong way to have depression, or to have a panic attack, or to feel suicidal.”

— Matt Haig

444. “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

445. “Do not fall for categories. Everyone is everything. Every ingredient inside a star is inside you, and every personality that ever existed competes in the theatre of your mind for the main role.”

— 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. “Anxiety takes away all the commas and full stops we need to make sense of ourselves.”

— Matt Haig

448. “You have to stop flicking ahead and just concentrate on the page you’re on.”

— Matt Haig

449. “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

450. “In California the only way to look like you are getting older is to look like you are getting younger... if you can move your forehead over the age of forty, then people become very suspicious.”

— Matt Haig