Sofie

“Matt told me he'd like to get me a garden, one day. It was exactly the kind of simple, preposterous ambition he tends to make - bold and big and untethered by reality. I laughed. I still think it's the most romantic thing he's ever said.”
― Alice Vincent , Why Women Grow: Stories of Soil, Sisterhood and Survival

“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

“I stayed awake for a while as Isobel slipped towards sleep. The trouble was, I still wasn't use to the night. It may not have been as dark as I first thought it to be. There was moonlight, startlight, airglow, streetlamps and sunlight backscattered by interplanetary dust, but humans still spend half their time in deep shadow. This, I was sure, was one of the chief reasons for personal and sexual relationships here. The need to find comfort in the dark. And it was a comfort, being next to her. So I just stayed there, hearing her breath move in and out, sounding like the tides of some exotic sea. At some point my little finger touched hers, in the double-night beneath the duvet, and this time I kept it there and imagined I was really what she thought I was. And that we were connected. Two humans, primitive enough to truly care about each-other. It was a comforting thought, and the one that lead me down those ever-darkening stairs of the mind towards sleep.”
― Matt Haig

“You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library