The key to happiness - or that even more desired thing, calmness - lies not in always thinking happy thoughts. No. That is impossible. No mind on earth with any kind of intelligence could spend a lifetime enjoying only happy thoughts. They key is in accepting your thoughts, all of them, even the bad ones. Accept thoughts, but don't become them. Understand, for instance, that having a sad thought, even having a continual succession of sad thoughts, is not the same as being a sad person.

— Matt Haig

The next day I had a hangover. I realized that if getting drunk was how people forgot they were mortal, then hangovers were how they remembered.

— Matt Haig

The price for being intelligent enough to be the first species to be fully aware of the cosmos might just be a capacity to feel a whole universe’s worth of darkness.

— Matt Haig

There aren't any fences to the imagination, and so there shouldn't be any for books.

— Matt Haig

(T)here are only two things that are true 100 out of 100 times and that is that you live and also that you die, and every other thing is not true or false it is a mix. It is both. It is none.

— Matt Haig

There is no standard normal. Normal is subjective. There are seven billion versions of normal on this planet.

— Matt Haig

There is only one genre in fiction, the genre is called book.

— Matt Haig

There is this idea that you either read to escape or you read to find yourself. I don't really see the difference. We find ourselves through the process of escaping.

— Matt Haig

The way out is never through yourself.

— Matt Haig

This is the whole stupid thing about all these blood relationships. They depend on people staying the same, standing in the same spot they were in over a decade ago, when they first met. Surely the reality is that connections between people aren't permanent, but fleeting and random, like a solar eclipse or clouds meeting in the sky. They exist in a constantly moving universe full of constantly moving objects.

— Matt Haig