The Midnight Library

by Matt Haig

‘You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it.’

You are forgetting who you are. In becoming everyone, you are becoming no one.

She realised that you could be as honest as possible in life, but people only see the truth if it is close enough to their reality. As Thoreau wrote, ‘It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.’

but this was all meaningless without love.

thing that had left her vulnerable, really, was the absence of love.

Never underestimate the big importance of small things, Mrs Elm had said. You must always remember that.

Nora worried about herself as if she was actually someone else.

Every life contains many millions of decisions. Some big, some small. But every time one decision is taken over another, the outcomes differ. An irreversible variation occurs, which in turn leads to further variations . . .

You came back here this time not because you wanted to die, but because you want to live.

‘Life begins,’ Sartre once wrote, ‘on the other side of despair.’

We don’t have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility.

‘You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it.’

Nora remembered what it was to care and be cared for.

It is quite a revelation to discover that the place you wanted to escape to is the exact same place you escaped from. That the prison wasn’t the place, but the perspective.

The paradox of volcanoes was that they were symbols of destruction but also life. Once the lava slows and cools, it solidifies and then breaks down over time to become soil – rich, fertile soil.