The Midnight Library

by Matt Haig

She didn’t need a vineyard or a Californian sunset to be happy. She didn’t even need a large house and the perfect family. She just needed potential. And she was nothing if not potential.

The sky grows dark The black over blue Yet the stars still dare To shine for you

But it is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy.

Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies.

We just have to close our eyes and savour the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays. We are as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum.

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. While we are alive we al...

So let’s be kind to the people in our own existence. Let’s occasionally look up from the spot in which we are because, wherever we happen to be s...

The impossible, I suppose, happens via living.

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.’

is quite a revelation to discover that the place you wanted to escape to is the exact same place you escaped from.

That the prison wasn’t the place, but the perspective.

‘Well, that’s the beauty, isn’t it? You just never know how it ends.’