The Midnight Library

by Matt Haig

‘To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three-parts dead’.

A person was like a city. You couldn’t let a few less desirable parts put you off the whole. There may be bits you don’t like, a few dodgy side streets and suburbs, but the good stuff makes it worthwhile.

‘Want,’ she told her, in a measured tone, ‘is an interesting word. It means lack. Sometimes if we fill that lack with something else the original want disappears entirely. Maybe you have a lack problem rather than a want problem. Maybe there is a life that you really want to live.’

Sometimes regrets aren’t based on fact at all. Sometimes regrets are just . . .’ She searched for the appropriate term and found it. ‘A load of bullshit.’

You could have just told me I wasn’t a bad cat owner. Why didn’t you?’ ‘Because, Nora, sometimes the only way to learn is to live.’

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

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 (or the ‘tonic of wildness’ as Thoreau called it) 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.

the more people were connected on social media, the lonelier society became.

To be part of nature was to be part of the will to live.

When you stay too long in a place, you forget just how big an expanse the world is. You get no sense of the length of those longitudes and latitudes.

it is hard to have a sense of the vastness inside...

But once you sense that vastness, once something reveals it, hope emerges, whether you want it to or not, and it clings to you as...

‘But you will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life,’

The sky grows dark The black over blue Yet the stars still dare To shine for you