The Midnight Library

by Matt Haig

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

💕💕💕💕💕💕

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

- Thoreau

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

Another by Thoreau! currently adding everything ever written by him to my TBR

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

Beautiful 🥹

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. But once you sense that vastness, once something reveals it, hope emerges, whether you want it to or not, and it clings to you as stubbornly as lichen clings to rock.

The thing you have to remember is that this is an opportunity and it is rare and we can undo any mistake we made, live any life we want. Any life. 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,’

‘In one life we have known each other for years and are married . . .’ he said. ‘In most lives I don’t know you at all,’ she countered, now staring straight at him. ‘That’s so sad.’ ‘I don’t think so.’ ‘Really?’ ‘Really.’ She smiled. ‘We’re special, Nora. We’re chosen. No one understands us.’ ‘No one understands anyone. We’re not chosen.’ ‘The only reason I am still in this life is because of you . . .’ She lunged forward and kissed him.

Ummmmm??!!!! I was not prepared for this to get cute!? What the heck Nora!!!

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

Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.

We just have to close our eyes and savour the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays. We are as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum. 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. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility.

The impossible, I suppose, happens via living.

💝