The Midnight Library

by Matt Haig

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

‘Because you aren’t the same person you were yesterday, are you?’ ‘None of us are,’ said Nora, briskly. ‘Our brains change. It’s called neuroplasticity.

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’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see. *

We don’t have to play every game to know what winning feels like.

So let’s be kind to the people in our own existence. Let’s occasionally look up from the spot in which we are because, wherever we happen to be standing, the sky above goes on for ever.

It was interesting, she mused to herself, how life sometimes simply gave you a whole new perspective by waiting around long enough for you to see it.

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