The Midnight Library

by Matt Haig

sometimes the only way to learn is to live.’

The lonely mind in the busy city yearns for connection because it thinks human-to-human connection is the point of everything. But amid pure nature (or the ‘tonic of wildness’ as Thoreau called it) solitude took on a different character. It became in itself a kind of connection. A connection between herself and the world. And between her and herself.

‘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.”’

it is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself.

We only need to be one person. We only need to feel one existence. We don’t have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite.