The Midnight Library

by Matt Haig

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

you can choose choices but not outcomes.

‘Never underestimate the big importance of small things,’

Dream big . . . You can be anything you want to be. Because in one life, you are.’

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

Every second of every day we are entering a new universe. 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.’

And that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness. You can’t have one without the other.

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

What sometimes feels like a trap is actually just a trick of the mind.

And she didn’t want to live any other life than the one that was hers. The one that could be a messy struggle, but it was her messy struggle. A beautiful messy struggle.

We don’t have to play every game to know what winning feels like. We don’t have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music.

We only need to be one person. We only need to feel one existence. We don’t have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite.

The paradox of volcanoes was that they were symbols of destruction but also life.

‘Well, that’s the beauty, isn’t it? You just never know how it ends.’