The Life Impossible

by Matt Haig

I have never believed in magic, and I still don’t. But sometimes what looks like magic is simply a part of life we don’t understand yet.

‘I feel like I have a life inside me that needs to be lived and I am not living it.’

Music to me is like a friend that comes in just when you need it.

There are two kinds of ghosts that torment you when a young person dies. The ghost of who they were, and the ghosts of who they could have been.

That’s the thing with grief. The way it kind of sinks you into death as well. I mean, you are still biologically functioning obviously. You are out there breathing and seeing and talking but you aren’t properly alive any more.

When you grieve someone you see their message in everything. Even in the sunlight on a blade of grass. The whole world becomes their translator.

This is the challenge of life, isn’t it? Moving forward without annihilating what has gone before. Knowing what to clasp onto and what to release without destroying yourself. Trying not to be the meteor and the dinosaur at once.

The feeling is that of the whole world happening.

Someone once told me the way to die happy is to die complete. To live like you eat a delicious meal. To devour and enjoy every course so that when you have finished you are full, and enjoyed every mouthful, but aren’t too sad there is no more.

Grief was a flood that ran through you and caused others to stand aside.

Every single person on this planet is a context and the circumstances of that context can never be seen fully. We are all mysteries, even to ourselves.

The trouble with having a change of scene is that if you get there and find that you feel just the same, then you really are trapped.

The point of desperation is often the point of truth. When things are wrong, we need to reach rock bottom in order for change to happen. We sometimes need to feel trapped in order to find the way out. We don’t meet ourselves in the light and air.

I had spent a lifetime hating my appearance in the present and then appreciating it in retrospect.

If only we could always have the perspective of the future with us as we live that present.

in each moment we have never been so old, but we are of course also the youngest we will ever be.

Mental fortitude and emotional sympathy.

People say that love is rare. I am not so sure. What is rare is something even more desirable. Understanding. There is no point in being loved if you are not understood.

They are simply loving an idea of you they have in their mind. They are in love with love. They are in love with their loving. To be understood. And not only that, but to be understood and appreciated once understood. That is what matters.

‘There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand.’

we are embarrassed by what we don’t understand about ourselves.

I think I had been playing hard to get. With God, I mean. I wanted Him to come to me. To prove He was there. But now I realised it doesn’t work like that. We make our own faith just as we make our own stories. We believe in what we want to believe, but it takes effort.

All reading, in short, is telepathy and all reading is time travel. It connects us to everyone and everywhere and every time and every imagined dream.

the willingness to be confused, I now realise, is a prerequisite for a good life. Wanting things to be simple can become a kind of prison, it really can, because you end up staying trapped inside how you want things to be rather than embracing how they could be. You end up closed. You end up shutting doors to so many possibilities.

The love a cat can give you is sudden and warm. It is just that a cat’s love comes completely free of any moral or ethical principles. It is love for the hell of it. It is an entirely recreational love. In-the-moment love. But it is still, somehow, love.

spoilers in our stories but we seek them in our lives. We want to know we will fall in love, or be healthy, or finish the degree in style, get the good job or the comfortable pension. We want the solution. We want it all mapped out. We want to know everything ends well. We want it all spoiled, with as little mystery as possible. But where is the fun in that? And take it from someone with gifts of precognition beyond all the world’s population: there are no real spoilers. There is always an observer effect. There is always an unknown variable, and that unknown variable is often yourself. Embrace the mystery would be my advice.

People you love deeply become elemental. To hear they won’t be there any more is like hearing the air or ocean won’t be. It feels like a fatal disruption to the universe.

him). But that is how we beat death. We beat death by living while we are here.