The Midnight Library

by Matt Haig

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

‘Go confidently in the direction of your dreams,’

Every move had been a mistake, every decision a disaster, every day a retreat from who she’d imagined she’d be.

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.

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.’

‘Because, Nora, sometimes the only way to learn is to live.’

‘The only way to learn is to live.’

‘If one advances confidently,’ Thoreau had written in Walden, ‘in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.’

In the face of death, life seemed more attractive, and as life seemed more attractive,

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

Acres of disappointment and monotony and hurts and rivalries but with flashes of wonder and beauty.

All good things are wild and free.

There is no rejection, there is only redirection.

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.’

‘I am saying that the thing that looks the most ordinary might end up being the thing that leads you to victory.

‘Compassion is the basis of morality,’

That the prison wasn’t the place, but the perspective.