Salonee > Salonee's Quotes

“Anxiety,’ Kierkegaard wrote, in the middle of the nineteenth century, ‘is the dizziness of freedom.”
― Matt Haig, How to Stop Time

“It wasn’t just the loss of people I had known but also the loss of myself. The loss of who I had been when I had been with them.”
― Matt Haig, How to Stop Time

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Daring to ‘know thyself’ means daring to ‘destroy thyself’. First, we must pull ourselves apart. Then, with the same pieces, we will assemble a new Self.”
― Elif Shafak

“We’re all just looking for a place of safety. And if you don’t find one, then you have to learn how to pass the time.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“Things, once gone, can’t be put back; he knew that now. A punch, once delivered, can’t be withdrawn. Words, once spoken, can’t be unsaid. We may go on as if nothing has been lost, nothing done, nothing said; we may claim to forget it all; but our innermost core doesn’t forget, because we have been changed for ever.”
― Julian Barnes

“It occurred to me that human beings didn’t live beyond a hundred because they simply weren’t up for it. Psychologically, I mean. You kind of ran out. There wasn’t enough self to keep going. You grew too bored of your own mind. Of the way life repeated itself. How, after a while, there wasn’t a smile or gesture that you hadn’t seen before. There wasn’t a change in the world order that didn’t echo other changes in the world order. And the news stopped being new.”
― Matt Haig, How to Stop Time

“If you live long enough you realise that every proven fact is later disproved and then proven again.”
― Matt Haig, How to Stop Time

“Nothing fixes a thing so firmly in the memory as the wish to forget it.”
― Matt Haig, How to Stop Time

“If you are irritated by every rub, how will your mirror be polished?”
― Rumi