The Midnight Library

by Matt Haig

‘Oh right. Great. I was thinking of doing a half-marathon and then I remembered I hate running.’

If he said something was dead it was, in all probability, dead.

The doctor says it’s situational depression. It’s just that I keep on having new . . . situations.

She didn’t tell him that while coal and diamonds are both carbon, coal is too impure to be able, under whatever pressure, to become a diamond.

she was. A black hole. A dying star, collapsing in on itself.

Nora’s mind grew heavier at the idea her brother might feel like she did.

‘I’m having a pretty shit time too, if we’re doing the Misery Olympics.’

don’t think your problem was stage fright. Or wedding fright. I think your problem was life fright.’

was happy and casual and relaxed in a way Nora no longer knew how to be.

Nora shook her head. Wishing it would fall off. Her own head. Onto the floor.

she wished there were nothing but doors ahead of her, which she could walk through one by one, leaving everything behind.

‘Go confidently in the direction of your dreams,’ Thoreau had said. ‘Live the life you’ve imagined.’

Maybe she was just really crap at it. At life.

She wanted to have a purpose, something to give her a reason to exist.

She was a waterfall of apologies. She was drowning in herself.

The thought was like a ceaseless mind-cramp, something too uncomfortable to bear yet too strong to avoid.

Happy moments can turn into pain, given time.

Every move had been a mistake, every decision a disaster, every day a retreat from who she’d imagined she’d be.

Happy. Loved. Nothing.

Dear Whoever, I had all the chances to make something of my life, and I blew every one of them. Through my own carelessness and misfortune, the world has retreated from me, and so now it makes perfect sense that I should retreat from the world. If I felt it was possible to stay, I would. But I don’t. And so I can’t. I make life worse for people. I have nothing to give. I’m sorry. Be kind to each other. Bye, Nora

Actions can’t be reversed within a lifetime, however much we try

‘Regrets ignore chronology. They float around. The sequence of these lists changes all the time.

‘I regret not telling my father I loved him before he died’

‘I regret not learning how to be a happier person.’

A game where you grabbed the first person you could find when the music stopped.

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

‘True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing.’

This was a life where she put four exclamation marks in a row. That was probably what happier, less uptight people did.

Everyone’s lives could have ended up an infinite number of ways.

She had shrunk for him, but he still hadn’t found the space he needed. No more.

‘It’s hard to predict, isn’t it?’

‘The things that will make us happy.’

The Only Way to Learn Is to Live

You see, cats know. They understand when their time is up.

‘So, you see? 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.’

sometimes the only way to learn is to live.’

Time went by. Although technically, of course, it didn’t.

death is the opposite of possibility.

The more focused you were on the activity, the less focused you were on everything else. You kind of stopped being you and became the thing you were doing.

But since when did taste have anything to do with happiness?

‘Well, that you can choose choices but not outcomes. But I stand by what I said. It was a good choice. It just wasn’t a desired outcome.’

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

‘People with stamina aren’t made any differently to anyone else,’ she was saying. ‘The only difference is they have a clear goal in mind, and a determination to get there. Stamina is essential to stay focused in a life filled with distraction.

‘If you aim to be something you are not, you will always fail. Aim to be you.

Aim to be the truest version of you.

. . . I love you, Dad. And I just want to say that—

‘I just didn’t . . . don’t tell you that enough. I just want you to know I love you.

it wasn’t her fault that her parents had never been able to love her the way parents were meant to: without condition.

so she just picked up the odd word or phrase that floated into her mind like croutons in minestrone.

Because life isn’t simply made of the things we do, but the things we don’t do too.