The Midnight Library

by Matt Haig

I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life.

Thomas Hobbes had viewed memory and imagination as pretty much the same thing,

‘Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.’

really success isn’t something you measure, and life isn’t a race you can win.

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.