Top 500 Matt Haig Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “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

402. “Just as dogs were thwarted wolves, parks were thwarted forests. Humans loved both, possibly because humans were, well, thwarted.”

— Matt Haig

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

406. “A kiss,′ she said, ’is like music. It stops time...”

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

409. “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

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

— Matt Haig

411. “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

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

— Matt Haig

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

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

— Matt Haig

416. “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

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

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

— Matt Haig

420. “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

421. “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

422. “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

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. “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

425. “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

426. “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

427. “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

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

— Matt Haig

430. “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

431. “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

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

— Matt Haig

433. “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

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. “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

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. “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

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

— Matt Haig

439. “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

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

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

442. “Love was trapping me here.”

— Matt Haig

443. “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

444. “Much of gossip is envy in disguise, Much of self-doubt is conformity in disguise.”

— Matt Haig

445. “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

446. “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

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

— Matt Haig

448. “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

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

— Matt Haig

450. “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