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.’

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.

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.

She wasn’t a black hole, she decided. She was a volcano. And like a volcano she couldn’t run away from herself. She’d have to stay there and tend to that wasteland. She could plant a forest inside herself.