The Midnight Library

by Matt Haig

‘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.’

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. Just as, she supposed, it is hard to have a sense of the vastness inside any one person.

‘And remember, if you die in a life, there is no way back here.’ ‘That’s not fair.’ ‘The library has strict rules. Books are precious. You have to treat them carefully.’

And we spend so much time wishing our lives were different, comparing ourselves to other people and to other versions of ourselves, when really most lives contain degrees of good and degrees of bad.’

I mean, it would have made things a lot easier if we understood there was no way of living that can immunise you against sadness. And that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness.

She remembered studying Aristotle as a first-year Philosophy student. And being a bit depressed by his idea that excellence was never an accident. That excellent outcomes were the result of ‘the wise choice of many alternatives’.

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.