The Midnight Library

by Matt Haig

loneliness was a fundamental part of being a human in an essentially meaningless universe,

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

Happy moments can turn into pain, given time.

sometimes the only way to learn is to live.’

this Midnight Library is not one of ghosts. It is not a library of corpses. It is a library of possibility. And death is the opposite of possibility. Understand?’

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

Fish get depression.

Fish get depressed when they have a lack of stimulation. A lack of everything. When they are just there, floating in a tank that resembles nothing at all.

‘Librarians have knowledge. They guide you to the right books. The right worlds. They find the best places. Like soul-enhanced search engines.’

‘The only way to learn is to live.’

Nora had also felt that simply to be in his presence was to commit some kind of invisible crime.

She was in shock. But it was a slightly different kind of shock than the others on the dinghy assumed. It wasn’t the shock of having been close to death. It was the shock of realising she actually wanted to live.

To be part of nature was to be part of the will to live.

There was an invisible baton of failure her mother had passed down, and Nora had held it for a long time. Maybe that was why she had given up on so many things. Because she had it written in her DNA that she had to fail.