The Midnight Library

by Matt Haig

Happy moments can turn into pain, given time.

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.’

something quite freeing about that. To be existing without any expectation, even her own. As

Because too often our view of success is about some external bullshit idea of achievement – an Olympic medal, the ideal husband, a good salary. And we have all these metrics that we try and reach. When really success isn’t something you measure, and life isn’t a race you can win. It’s all…bollocks, actually…’

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.

You could eat in the finest restaurants, you could partake in every sensual pleasure, you could sing on stage in São Paulo to twenty thousand people, you could soak up whole thunderstorms of applause, you could travel to the ends of the Earth, you could be followed by millions on the internet, you could win Olympic medals, but this was all meaningless without love.

it is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy.

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.