Jas > Jas's Quotes

“This was a life where she put four exclamation points in a row. That was probably what happier, less uptight people did.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Generally I find men are a lot more concerned with limiting the freedoms of women than exercising personal freedom for themselves.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Life is the thing you bring with you inside your own head.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“She believes Marianne lacks ‘warmth’, by which she means the ability to beg for love from people who hate her.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“If people appeared to behave pointlessly in grief, it was only because human life was pointless, and this was the truth that grief revealed.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“A person was like a city. You couldn't let a few less desirable parts put you off the whole. There may be bits you don't like, a few dodgy side streets and suburbs, but the good stuff makes it worthwhile.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“So, you see? Sometimes regrets aren’t based on fact at all. Sometimes regrets are just . . .’ She searched for the appropriate term and found it. ‘A load of bullshit.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“...sometimes the only way to learn is to live.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“I mean, it would have made things a lot easier if we understood there was no way of living that can immunise you against sadness. 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

“Being aware that everything that could possibly happen happened to her, somewhere, in some life, kind of absolved her a little from decisions.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“In chess, as in life, possibility is the basis of everything. Every hope, every dream, every regret, every moment of living.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Nora wanted to live in a world where no cruelty existed, but the only worlds she had available to her were worlds with humans in them.”
― 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. That, she supposed, was the basis of depression as well as the difference between fear and despair. Fear was when you wandered into a cellar and worried that the door would close shut. Despair was when the door closed and locked behind you.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“There was an inevitability about the road towards each other which encouraged meandering along the route.”
― Zadie Smith, NW

“Ask: if flexing is being able to say the most in the fewest number of words, is there a greater flex than love?”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water