How to Stop Time

by Matt Haig

That’s another thing about getting older. Time speeds up.’

two teenagers lean against the wall, staring down at their phones as devoutly as old priests with prayer books.

I pleaded with God, I asked and begged and bargained, but God did not bargain. God was stubborn and deaf and oblivious.

you live long enough you realise that every proven fact is later disproved and then proven again.

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.

We have the knowledge to realise we are just a mass of quanta and particles, like everything else is, and yet we keep trying to separate ourselves from the universe we live in, to give ourselves a meaning above that of a tree or a rock or a cat or a turtle.

But history you have lived is different to history you read in a book or on a screen. And some things in the past can’t be tamed.

‘People believed in witches because it made things easier. People don’t just need an enemy, they need an explanation.

The first technology to lead to fake news wasn’t the internet, it was the printing press.

Sometimes things are a change for the better and the worse at the same time, like the internet.

The progress of humanity seemed to be measured in the distance we placed between ourselves and nature.

The very reason such music exists is because it is a language that couldn’t be communicated in any other way.

You understand quite completely that the main lesson of history is: humans don’t learn from history.

Peace was made of porcelain, as it always was.

‘I sometimes want to stop time.

But we are all at the mercy of time.

‘A blade of grass is not dull until you see a flower.’

‘What we are and what we mean are different things.

The past is not one separate place. It is many, many places, and they are always ready to rise into the present.

The past resides inside the present, repeating, hiccupping, reminding you of all the stuff that no longer is.

The aim of the society is to provide a structure, a system, which enables us to enhance our lives.

Lives are lost in wars but it doesn’t mean they shouldn’t ever be fought.

loved her, instantly. Of course, most parents love their children instantly. But I mention it here because I still find it a remarkable thing. Where was that love before? Where did you acquire it from? The way it is suddenly there, total and complete, as sudden as grief, but in reverse, is one of the wonders about being human.

The lesson of history is that ignorance and superstition are things that can rise up, inside almost anyone, at any moment.

‘If there is such a thing as good marriage, it is because it resembles friendship rather than love.’

The past is never gone. It just hides.

this is a problem with living in the twenty-first century. Many of us have every material thing we need, so the job of marketing is now to tie the economy to our emotions, to make us feel like we need more by making us want things we never needed before. We are made to feel poor on thirty thousand pounds a year. To feel poorly travelled if we have been to only ten other countries. To feel too old if we have a wrinkle. To feel ugly if we aren’t photoshopped and filtered.

People you love never die.

While knowledge without integrity is dangerous, integrity without knowledge is weak and useless.

We are mysteries to ourselves. Even science knows that. We have no fucking idea how our own minds work.’

doesn’t matter that there is no way of resisting the laws of time. The time ahead of you is like the land beyond the ice. You can guess what it could be like but you can never know. All you know is the moment you are in.

there are moments where the understanding is so profound that you see time both ways. Forwards and back. When they say “to understand the future you must understand the past”,

Look at the world, Tom. It’s all fucked. Mayflies don’t live long enough to learn. They are born, they grow up, they make the same mistakes, over and over. It’s all a big circle, spinning around, creating more destruction every time. Look at America. Look at Europe. Look at the internet. Civilisation never stays around for long before the Roman Empire is falling again. Superstition is back. Lies are back. Witch hunts are back. We’re dipping back into the Dark Ages, Tom. Not that we ever really left them.

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

But the thing is: you cannot know the future. You look at the news and it looks terrifying. But you can never be sure. That is the whole thing with the future. You don’t know. At some point you have to accept that you don’t know. You have to stop flicking ahead and just concentrate on the page you are on.

Everything in life is uncertain. That is how you know you are existing in the world, the uncertainty.

History was – is – a one-way street. You have to keep walking forwards. But you don’t always need to look ahead. Sometimes you can just look around and be happy right where you are.

understand that the way you stop time is by stopping being ruled by it.

‘The first technology to lead to fake news wasn’t the internet, it was the printing press’