How to Stop Time

by Matt Haig

‘Santa Barbara is pleasant. It’s heaven, with a bit more traffic.

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?

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.

I suppose I needed a dog with problems, in order to think less about my own.

‘The past is never gone. It just hides.’

the main lesson of history is: humans don’t learn from history.

I have only been alive for four hundred and thirty-nine years, which is of course nowhere near long enough to understand the minimal facial expressions of the average teenage boy.

‘The war against boredom. It is a very real war. It is a war in which the enemy is all around us.’

There is no possible way of living in a world without books or trees or sunsets.

‘A wave can kill you. Or you can ride it. It’s sometimes more dangerous to shy away.

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