The Midnight Library

by Matt Haig

‘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.’

itself. Maybe it wasn’t the lack of achievements that had made her and her brother’s parents unhappy, maybe it was the expectation to achieve in the first place.

Nora had always had a problem accepting herself. From as far back as she could remember, she’d had the sense that she wasn’t enough. Her parents, who both had their own insecurities, had encouraged that idea.

‘No. It’s about everything. It seems impossible to live without hurting people.’ ‘That’s because it is.’ ‘So why live at all?’ ‘Well, in fairness, dying hurts people too.

‘Why did you think he was better than you? Because your parents did?’

sibling rivalry isn’t about siblings but parents,

‘You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it.’

‘We only know what we perceive. Everything we experience is ultimately just our perception of it. “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”’

‘When you have worries about things you don’t know about, like the future, it’s a very good idea to remind yourself of things you do know.’

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