How to Stop Time

by Matt Haig

‘There is no out, Tom. You know that. You are an albatross. You are not a mayfly. You are an albatross.’

wise men once said wild winds are death to the candle

‘Any life I want?’ ‘Any life you want.’ I am pretty sure, Hendrich being Hendrich, he was assuming that I was going to demand something extravagant and expensive. That I would want to live in a yacht off the Amalfi Coast, or in a penthouse in Dubai. But I had been thinking about this, and I knew what to say. ‘I want to go back to London.’ ‘London? She probably isn’t there, you know.’ ‘I know. I just want to be back there. To feel like I’m home again. And I want to be a teacher. A history teacher.’

living in london as a history teacher sounds amazing

I see her face as she speaks unheard words. She is wearing glasses and jeans and a long cardigan that flaps gently in the wind, and she pulls her hair behind her ear. She is laughing now, at something a pupil is saying. The laugh lights up her face, and I am momentarily mesmerised.

Forever, Emily Dickinson said, is composed of nows. But how do you inhabit the now you are in? How do you stop the ghosts of all the other nows from getting in? How, in short, do you live?

thought daughter type words

I look at the poster of Shakespeare. He seems to be staring at me, like an old friend. There is a quote below his image. We know what we are, but know not what we may be.

But this is how I remember these things, and all we can ever be is faithful to our memories of reality, rather than the reality itself, which is something closely related but never precisely the same thing.

did not know how to be me, my strange and unusual self, without her. I had tried it, of course. I had existed whole years without her, but that was all it had been. An existence. A book with no words.

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

Dr Hutchinson smiled. ‘This is a gigantic thing to comprehend.’ And I smiled too, and felt the soul-anchoring joy of being understood.

soul-anchoring joy of being understood is a beautiful way of saying it

The longer you live, the more you realise that nothing is fixed. Everyone will become a refugee if they live long enough. Everyone would realise their nationality means little in the long run. Everyone would see their worldviews challenged and disproved. Everyone would realise that the thing that defines a human being is being a human.

this book already has so much quotability

I hadn’t played the piano for years, I realise. I am fine with that, most of the time. I have long convinced myself that the piano is like a drug, seductive and strong, and it can mess you up, it can awaken dead emotions, it can drown you in your lost selves. It is a nervous breakdown waiting to happen. I wonder if I will ever play again.

pianos. i love pianos. i used to play as well

As then, she seems wholly herself. It takes a lot to be unique in a species of so many. She has style. I don’t mean in what she is wearing (corduroy blazer, jeans, glasses), though that is perfectly fine. I mean in the easeful way in which she places the book down beside her on the bench and stares around at the park.

"she seems wholly herself"

The key to happiness wasn’t being yourself, because what did that even mean? Everyone had many selves. No. The key to happiness is finding the lie that suits you best.

lowkey made me think

All you can do with the past is carry it around, feeling its weight slowly increase, praying it never crushes you completely.

nostalgia

And a life is like that. There’s no need to fear change, or necessarily welcome it, not when you don’t have anything to lose. Change is just what life is. It is the only constant I know.

Skyscrapers I Like The way That when you Tilt Poems On their side They Look like Miniature Cities From A long way Away. Skyscrapers Made out Of Words.

i love poetry and i love this

‘Liberty Enlightening the World.’ It was my first sighting of the Statue of Liberty. Her right arm raising that torch high into the air. She was a copper colour back then, and shone, and looked most impressive. She glowed in the sun, as we got closer to the harbour. She seemed vast – epic and ancient – something on the scale of sphinxes and pyramids. I had only been alive since the world had become smaller, more modest again. But I looked at the New York skyline and felt like the world was dreaming bigger. Clearing its throat. Getting some confidence. I put my hand in my pocket, held Marion’s penny between my fingers. It was, as ever, a comfort.

me

Music doesn’t get in. Music is already in. Music simply uncovers what is there, makes you feel emotions that you didn’t necessarily know you had inside you, and runs around waking them all up. A rebirth of sorts. There was such a yearning and energy to it. I closed my eyes. I could not describe here on the page how I felt. The very reason such music exists is because it is a language that couldn’t be communicated in any other way. But all I can say is that I felt suddenly alive again.

music <3

Places don’t matter to people any more. Places aren’t the point. People are only ever half present where they are these days. They always have at least one foot in the great digital nowhere.

‘I am not sure I have ever met someone like you,’ I said. ‘That is good. What point would my life have, if there was a duplicate?’

When I was with her, everything faded away and I felt calm. She was a counterbalance. She gave me peace just by looking at her, which might explain why I looked at her for too long, and with too much intensity in my eyes. The way people never look at people any more. I wanted her in every sense.

Her smiles, my springs that makes my joys to grow, Her frowns the Winters of my woe.

‘I am not a pale theatre lady. I am a fruit picker. I am plain.’ ‘You are the least plain thing I know.’ Her hand was on me. ‘My clothes are just rags with dreams.’ ‘You may be better without them, then.’ ‘Dreams?’ ‘No.’

chat is this rizz?? ok sorry. i fear this rizz would work on me

We kissed and I closed my eyes and inhaled lavender and her, and I felt so terrified and so in love that I realised they – the terror, the love – were one and the same thing.

another banger quote

I used to watch Rose, between the musical interludes, and she used to observe me too, in the gallery. What was it about those silent exchanges in a crowded place? There was a magic to them, like a secret shared.

Gossip lived. It wasn’t just a currency, it had a life. Stories buzzed and hummed and circulated like gadflies in the air, hovering amid the stench of sewage and the clatter of carts.

gossip girl x shakespeare

Bisbee, Arizona,

yooo i have been there

The lesson of history is that ignorance and superstition are things that can rise up, inside almost anyone, at any moment. And what starts as a doubt in a mind can swiftly become an act in the world.

‘Anxiety,’ Kierkegaard wrote, in the middle of the nineteenth century, ‘is the dizziness of freedom.’

Maybe that is what it takes to love someone. Finding a happy mystery you would like to unravel for ever.

After all, we aren’t just who we are born. We are who we become. We are what life does to us.

‘Everything is going to be all right. Or, if not, everything is going to be, so let’s not worry.’