Top 500 Matt Haig Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

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

— Matt Haig

407. “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

408. “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

409. “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

410. “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

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

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

413. “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

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

— 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. “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

418. “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

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

— Matt Haig

420. “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

421. “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

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

— Matt Haig

423. “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

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

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

426. “Love was trapping me here.”

— Matt Haig

427. “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

428. “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

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

— Matt Haig

430. “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

431. “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

432. “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

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

— Matt Haig

434. “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

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

— Matt Haig

436. “Even more staggeringly, depression is a disease so bad that people are killing themselves because of it in a way they do not kill themselves with any other illness. Yet people still don’t really think depression really is that bad. If they did, they wouldn’t say the things they say.”

— Matt Haig

437. “Misery, like yoga, is not a competitive sport.”

— Matt Haig

438. “So why do we bother with love? No matter how much we love someone we are never going to make them, or ourselves, free of pain.”

— Matt Haig

439. “When I am in a room with People,” he wrote, “if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes home to myself: but the identity of everyone in the room begins to press upon me so that I am in a very little time annihilated.”

— Matt Haig

440. “In your mind, change the name of every day to Saturday. And change the name of work to play.”

— Matt Haig

441. “A cow is a cow even if you call it beef.”

— Matt Haig

442. “Continually looking for the meaning of life is like looking for the meaning of toast. It is sometimes better just to eat the toast.”

— Matt Haig

443. “Dads are just men who have babies but I know he loved me because I felt it go out of me when he crashed. It was like air or blood or bones or something that made me me and it wasnt there any more and I had only half of it now and I didn’t know if that was enough.”

— Matt Haig

444. “Anxiety,’ Kierkegaard wrote, in the middle of the nineteenth century, ’is the dizziness of freedom.”

— Matt Haig

445. “Familiarity could make you a stranger to yourself.”

— Matt Haig

446. “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

447. “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

448. “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

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

— Matt Haig

450. “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