The Midnight Library

by Matt Haig

‘Pressure makes us, though. You start off as coal and the pressure makes you a diamond.’

The universe tended towards chaos and entropy. That was basic thermodynamics. Maybe it was basic existence too.

Bertrand Russell wrote that ‘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.’

sometimes the only way to learn is to live.’

And death is the opposite of possibility.

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

The straightforward is never quite what it seems.’

‘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. It is the ability to stick to a task when your body and mind are at their limit, the ability to keep your head down, swimming in your lane, without looking around, worrying who might overtake you…’

‘I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.’

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

She had a fire inside her. She wondered if the fire was to warm her or destroy her. Then she realised. A fire had no motive. Only she could have that. The power was hers.

There is no rejection, there is only redirection.

‘Compassion is the basis of morality,’

She realised that she hadn’t tried to end her life because she was miserable, but because she had managed to convince herself that there was no way out of her misery.

‘We only know what we perceive. Everything we experience is ultimately just our perception of it. “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”’

‘Life begins,’ Sartre once wrote, ‘on the other side of despair.’

We don’t have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility.

It is quite a revelation to discover that the place you wanted to escape to is the exact same place you escaped from. That the prison wasn’t the place, but the perspective.