The Midnight Library

by Matt Haig

But she’d been feeling lonely. And though she’d studied enough existential philosophy to believe loneliness was a fundamental part of being a human in an essentially meaningless universe, it was good to see him.

Part of being human.

marriage was something you did at the appropriate time with the nearest available person.

Is it?

have carefully calculated that the pain of me living as the bloody disaster that is myself is greater than the pain anyone else will feel if I were to die. In

Is this what people think when they are suicidal? Or is it such a self absorbed time that how others might feel is simply not in the equation?

‘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

Rather than a want problem, is it a lack problem?

Stamina is essential to stay focused in a life filled with distraction. It is the ability to stick to a task when your body and mind are at their limit, the ability to keep your head down, swimming in your lane, without looking around, worrying who might overtake you . . .’ Who the hell was this person?

Def of stamina, focus, and grit.

he believed that the more people were connected on social media, the lonelier society became.

Much truth. And many “Fake” friends.

excellence was never an accident. That excellent outcomes were the result of ‘the wise choice of many alternatives’. And

Excellence -- how it is achieved.

‘Compassion is the basis of morality,’ the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer had written, in one of his softer moments. Maybe it was the basis of life too.

Compassion

He loved to gross Molly out with facts – a stomach gets a new lining every four days! Ear wax is a type of sweat! You have creatures called mites living in your eyelashes! – and loved to be inappropriate. He (at the duck pond, the first Saturday, within Molly’s earshot) enthusiastically told a random stranger that male ducks have penises shaped like corkscrews. On nights when he was

Funny facts

What sometimes feels like a trap is actually just a trick

A trick of the mind.