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As she stared at Voltaire’s still and peaceful expression – that total absence of pain – there was an inescapable feeling brewing in the darkness. Envy.
‘Pressure makes us, though.
There was an old musician’s cliché, about how there were no wrong notes on a piano. But her life was a cacophony of nonsense. A piece that could have gone in wonderful directions, but now went nowhere at all.
Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be different if you had made other choices . . . Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?’
Nora was only able to think of herself in terms of the things she wasn’t.
Tissues are like lives. There are always more.’
Bertrand Russell wrote that ‘To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three-parts dead’.
This library is called the Midnight Library, because every new life on offer here begins now. And now is midnight. It begins now. All these futures. That’s what is here. That’s what your books represent. Every other immediate present and ongoing future you could have had.’
If you have found a life you truly want to live, then you get to live it until you die of old age. If you really want to live a life hard enough, you don’t have to worry. You will stay there as if you have always been there. Because in one universe you have always been there.
A quiet that had a presence, that was a force in the air.
‘True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing.’ – Socrates
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.’ ‘Sounds hard.’
life isn’t simply made of the things we do, but the things we don’t do too.
‘You see, doing one thing differently is very often the same as doing everything differently. Actions can’t be reversed within a lifetime, however much we try . . .’
‘The only way to learn is to live.’
what we consider to be the most successful route for us to take, actually isn’t. Because too often our view of success is about some external bullshit idea of achievement
When really success isn’t something you measure, and life isn’t a race you can win. It’s all . . . bollocks, actually . . .’
success is a delusion.
Are there any other lives at all or is it just the furnishings that change?’
A physical shift.
Nora felt a deep sadness, down in her stomach. From her arrival into life, she was considered by her parents in a different way to her brother.
Places are places and memories are memories and life is fucking life.’
‘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.’ He’d also observed that part of this success was the product of being alone. ‘I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.’
The quiet made her realise how much noise there was elsewhere in the world. Here, noise had meaning. You heard something and you had to pay attention.
To be part of nature was to be part of the will to live.
Indeed, Nora had always had the sense that she came from a long line of regrets and crushed hopes that seemed to echo in every generation.
There was an invisible baton of failure her mother had passed down, and Nora had held it for a long time. Maybe that was why she had given up on so many things. Because she had it written in her DNA that she had to fail.
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.
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.
Both dead and alive in your own mind.’
About how human brains take complex information about the world and simplify it, so that when a human looks at a tree it translates the intricately complex mass of leaves and branches into this thing called ‘tree’. To be a human was to continually dumb the world down into an understandable story that keeps things simple.
‘It’s like how humans never see the second hand of a clock mid-tick,’ said
Minds can’t see what they can’t handle.’
‘You need to realise something if you are ever to succeed at chess,’ she said, as if Nora had nothing bigger to think about. ‘And the thing you need to realise is this: the game is never over until it is over. It isn’t over if there is a single pawn still on the board. If one side is down to a pawn and a king, and the other side has every player, there is still a game. And even if you were a pawn – maybe we all are – then you should remember that a pawn is the most magical piece of all. It might look small and ordinary but it isn’t. Because a pawn is never just a pawn. A pawn is a
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but they say sibling rivalry isn’t about siblings but parents, and I always felt my parents just encouraged his dreams a bit more.’
‘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.”’
There was no predicting every future outcome after a single decision.
She realised that you could be as honest as possible in life, but people only see the truth if it is close enough to their reality. As Thoreau wrote, ‘It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.’
some truths were just impossible to see.
but this was all meaningless without love.
And when she thought of her root life, the fundamental problem with it, the thing that had left her vulnerable, really, was the absence of love.
Every life contains many millions of decisions. Some big, some small. But every time one decision is taken over another, the outcomes differ. An irreversible variation occurs, which in turn leads to further variations . . .
What sometimes feels like a trap is actually just a trick of the mind.
She just needed potential.
Want is an interesting word. It means lack.
But it is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself.
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.
‘You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it.’
