Kat > Kat's Quotes

“Maybe even suicide would have been too active. Maybe in some lives you just float around and expect nothing else and don't even try to change. Maybe that was most lives.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“The rook is my favorite piece. It's the one that you think you don't have to watch out for. It is straightforward. You keep your eye on the queen and the knights, and the bishop because they are the sneaky ones. But it's the rook that often gets you. The straightforward is never quite what it seems.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Sometimes I think the crazies aren’t people, they’re not real. They’re like incarnations of the city’s madness, like escape valves. If they weren’t here, we’d all kill each other or die of stress,”
― Mariana Enríquez, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed

“We were scared, but fear doesn’t look the same as desperation.”
― Mariana Enríquez, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed

“they weren’t attracted to each other, they’d known it even before going to bed together, but they still wanted to try, because they were alone”
― Mariana Enríquez, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed

“I only became friends with him that summer when all my other friends decided to become assholes—otherwise known as the summer when I decided to hate all my friends.”
― Mariana Enríquez, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed

“she wanted to look at his photos again and get jealous when he paid more attention to the cat than to her”
― Mariana Enríquez, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed

“It is so easy, while trapped in just the one life, to imagine that times of sadness or tragedy or failure or fear are a result of that particular existence. That it is a by-product of living a certain way, rather than simply living.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“She realised that she hadn't tried to end her life because she was miserable, but because she had managed to convince herself that there was no way out of her misery.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Because we're always in pain, we know exactly what it means to hurt somebody else.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Heaven

“It is easy to mourn the lives we aren't living. Easy to wish we'd developed other other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we'd worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.
It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn't make and the work we didn't do the people we didn't do and the people we didn't marry and the children we didn't have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.
But it is not 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.
We can't tell if any of those other versions would of been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“And that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness. You can’t have one without the other. Of course, they come in different degrees and quantities. But there is no life where you can be in a state of sheer happiness for ever. And imagining there is just breeds more unhappiness in the life you’re in.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“The paradox of volcanoes was that they were symbols of destruction but also life. Once the lava slows and cools, it solidifies and then breaks down over time to become soil - rich, fertile soil.
She wasn't a black hole, she decided. She was a volcano. And like a volcano she couldn't run away from herself. She'd have to stay there and tend to that wasteland.
She could plant a forest inside herself.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“The lonely mind in the busy city yearns for connection because it thinks human-to-human connection is the point of everything. But amid pure nature (or the ‘tonic of wildness’ as Thoreau called it) solitude took on a different character. It became in itself a kind of connection. A connection between herself and the world. And between her and herself.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“When you stay too long in a place, you forget just how big an expanse the world is. You get no sense of the length of those longitudes and latitudes. Just as, she supposed, it is hard to have a sense of the vastness inside any one person. But once you sense that vastness, once something reveals it, hope emerges, whether you want it to or not, and it clings to you as stubbornly as lichen clings to rock.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“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. We can’t tell if any of those other versions would have been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“But I wasn’t crying because I was sad. I guess I was crying because we had nowhere else to go, no choice but to go on living in this world. Crying because we had no other world to choose, and crying at everything before us, everything around us.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Heaven

“At first, suicide was just a word, a vague idea separate from reality. It pointed at a way that other people chose to die, people I didn't even know. But once the word became my own, it took on the strangest shape. I could feel it growing deep inside of me. Suicide wasn't something that happened to strangers. I could make it happen, if I wanted to.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Heaven

“Of course, he'd seen her naked body front-on before, but the sight of her lying there utterly without resistance, yet armoured by the power of her own renunciation, was so intense as to bring tears to his eyes.”
― Han Kang, The Vegetarian

“She was no longer able to cope with all that her sister reminded her of. She'd been unable to forgive her for soaring alone over a boundary she herself could never bring herself to cross, unable to forgive that magnificent irresponsibility that had enabled Yeong-hye to shuck off social constraints and leave her behind, still a prisoner. And before Yeong-hye had broken those bars, she's never even known they were there.”
― Han Kang, The Vegetarian