The Life Impossible Quotes

“People say that love is rare. I am not so sure. What is rare is something even more desirable. Understanding. There is no point in being loved if you are not understood. They are simply loving an idea of you they have in their mind. They are in love with love. They are in love with their loving. To be understood. And not only that, but to be understood and appreciated once understood. That is what matters.”
― Matt Haig, The Life Impossible

“All reading, in short, is telepathy and all reading is time travel. It connects us to everyone and everywhere and every time and every imagined dream.”
― Matt Haig, The Life Impossible

“I always think that the quickest way to understand someone is to look at what’s on their bookshelves. Especially if they are honest bookshelves, not the fancy ornamental kind. And there was nothing fancy or ornamental about this place.”
― Matt Haig, The Life Impossible

“When you grieve someone you see their message in everything. Even in the sunlight on a blade of grass. The whole world becomes their translator.”
― Matt Haig, The Life Impossible

“But that is how we beat death. We beat death by living while we are here. Death may be infinite, but, as we know, infinity is a relative concept. We can create a bigger infinity out of life. By feeling. And every day I feel. I feel deeply and intensely and what I feel is gratitude.”
― Matt Haig, The Life Impossible

“I suppose that is one of the purposes of all reading. It helps you live lives beyond the one you are inside.”
― Matt Haig, The Life Impossible

“The point of desperation is often the point of truth. When things are wrong, we need to reach rock bottom in order for change to happen. We sometimes need to feel trapped in order to find the way out. We don’t meet ourselves in the light and air. We don’t understand the radio when the song is playing. We sometimes need to smash the thing to see how it is made.”
― Matt Haig, The Life Impossible

“My simmering disquiet about my own existence had always found its focus in my physical form. I had spent a lifetime hating my appearance in the present and appreciating it in retrospect.”
― Matt Haig, The Life Impossible

“People you love deeply become elemental. To hear they won't be there any more is like hearing the air or ocean won't be. It feels like a fatal disruption to the universe.”
― Matt Haig, The Life Impossible

“when it feels like we are truly, deeply alone, that is the moment when we most need to do something in order to remember how we connect.”
― Matt Haig, The Life Impossible

“We are never at the finish line of understanding. There is always something about life and the universe that we are still to discover”
― Matt Haig, The Life Impossible

“Whatever is awaiting me is awaiting me. For now, let’s live.”
― Matt Haig, The Life Impossible

“You are not here to be perfect. None of us are. You are here to live.”
― Matt Haig, The Life Impossible

“That is one great thing about having someone by your side. They are a shock absorber to the madness of experience.”
― Matt Haig, The Life Impossible

“This is the challenge of life, isn’t it? Moving forward without annihilating what has gone before. Knowing what to clasp onto and what to release without destroying yourself. Trying not to be the meteor and the dinosaur at once. There was also, in the front aisle nearest”
― Matt Haig, The Life Impossible

“It's so strange that we don't want spoilers in our stories but we seek them in our lives. ... We want it all mapped out. We want to know everything ends well. We want it all spoiled, with as little mystery as possible. But where is the fun in that? ... Embrace the mystery would be my advice. Embrace the impossibility of it all. Enjoy the not-knowing.”
― Matt Haig, The Life Impossible

“Negativity has more power than positivity. When you multiply a positive by a negative the product is always negative. You must see things differently. You must make a plus out of the minus.”
― Matt Haig, The Life Impossible

“I felt the love emanating from the creature. I know there is a common misconception that cats are somehow less loving than dogs. This is nonsense. The love a cat can give you is sudden and warm. It is just that a cat’s love comes completely free of any moral or ethical principles. It is love for the hell of it. It is an entirely recreational love. In-the-moment love. But it is still, somehow, love.”
― Matt Haig, The Life Impossible

“I suppose that is one of the purposes of all reading. It helps you live lives beyond the one you are inside. It turns our single-room mental shack into a mansion.”
― Matt Haig, The Life Impossible

“Don’t worry, confusion has its uses. Indeed, the willingness to be confused, I now realise, is a prerequisite for a good life. Wanting things to be simple can become a kind of prison, it really can, because you end up staying trapped inside how you want things to be rather than embracing how they could be. You end up closed. You end up shutting doors to so many possibilities.”
― Matt Haig, The Life Impossible

“You see, if you want to visit a new world, you don’t need a spacecraft. All you need to do is change your mind.”
― Matt Haig, The Life Impossible

“Life sings and blazes. Even when we are numb to it, when we hide from it, when it is too loud and painful to experience, when we aren’t equipped to feel it – it is there, waiting, to be cherished and protected, ready to give us at least one more blast of beauty before the night.”
― Matt Haig, The Life Impossible

“I had spent a lifetime hating my appearance in the present and then appreciating it in retrospect.”
― Matt Haig, The Life Impossible

“Maybe that’s the truly ridiculous thing, the way we don’t even blink at the sheer improbability of our lives here on this rock spinning through space. The way we exist out of nothing, the way the whole universe exists out of nothing, and here we are, the impossible something that made existence out of the void. Impossible life. A fluke to be cherished.”
― Matt Haig, The Life Impossible

“Joint pain was like grief. The more you thought about it, the more it hurt, but you couldn’t not think about it because it bloody hurt. Vicious circle.”
― Matt Haig, The Life Impossible

“Sometimes in order to be helpful we have to give up the desire to be liked.”
― Matt Haig, The Life Impossible

“I suppose that is one of the purposes of all reading. It helps you live lives beyond the one you are inside. It turns our single-room mental shack into a mansion. All reading, in short, is telepathy and all reading is time travel. It connects us to everyone and everywhere and every time and every imagined dream.”
― Matt Haig, The Life Impossible

“Sure, in each moment we have never been so old, but we are of course also the youngest we will ever be.”
― Matt Haig, The Life Impossible

“Eating watermelon in the sun was such a wonderful feeling I wondered why I hadn’t spent more of my life doing it. I wondered why it wasn’t everyone’s aspiration. I wondered why every successful businessperson on the planet continued to work and visit offices and stare at computers when they could just quit and eat watermelon in the sun for ever.”
― Matt Haig, The Life Impossible

“I have never believed in magic, and I still don’t. But sometimes what looks like magic is simply a part of life we don’t understand yet.”
― Matt Haig, The Life Impossible