The best quotes by the author we have brought to you
“A society which demands we be normal even as it drives us insane.” (Reasons to Stay Alive Quotes)
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“An annoying thing about depression is that thinking about life is inevitable. Depression makes thinkers out of all of us.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“And for three weeks I was trapped in my own mind again. But this time, I had weapons. One of them, maybe the most important, was this knowledge: I have been ill before, then well again. Wellness is possible.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“And most of all, books. They were, in and of themselves, reasons to stay alive. Every book written is the product of a human mind in a particular state. Add all the books together and you get the end sum of humanity. Every time I read a great book I felt I was reading a kind of map, a treasure map, and the treasure I was being directed to was in actual fact myself.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“Anxiety takes away all the commas and full stops we need to make sense of ourselves.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“Beware of the gap. The gap between where you are and where you want to be. Simply thinking of the gap widens it. And you end up falling through.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“But it only takes a doubt. A drop of ink falls into a clear glass of water and clouds the whole thing. So the moment after I realised I wasn’t perfectly well was the moment I realised I was still very ill indeed.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“Depression is also smaller than you. Always, it is smaller than you, even when it feels vast. It operates within you, you do not operate within it. It may be a dark cloud passing across the sky but – if that is the metaphor – you are the sky. You were there before it. And the cloud can’t exist without the sky, but the sky can exist without the cloud.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“From the outside a person sees your physical form, sees that you are a unified mass of atoms and cells. Yet inside you feel like a Big Bang has happened. You feel lost, disintegrated, spread across the universe amid infinite dark space.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“Hate is a pointless emotion to have inside you. It is like eating a scorpion to punish it for stinging you.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“How to stop time: kiss.
Matt Haig
How to travel in time: read.
How to escape time: music.
How to feel time: write.
How to release time: breathe.”
Reasons to Stay Alive
“I am you and you are me. We are alone, but not alone. We are trapped by time, but also infinite. Made of flesh, but also stars.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“I think that basically we are all helping people. All the time. Every time any of us speaks openly about mental health, we are helping normalize an illness that is still handled with protective goggles and safety gloves.” (Reasons to Stay Alive Quotes)
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“I want life. I want to read it and write it and feel it and live it. I want, for as much of the time as possible in this blink-of-an-eye existence we have, to feel all that can be felt.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“I wanted to be dead. No. That’s not quite right. I didn’t want to be dead, I just didn’t want to be alive.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“If someone loves you, let them. Believe in that love. Live for them, even when you feel there is no point.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“If you are the type of person who thinks too much about stuff then there is nothing lonelier in the world than being surrounded by a load of people on a different wavelength.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“If you have ever believed a depressive wants to be happy, you are wrong. They could not care less about the luxury of happiness. They just want to feel an absence of pain.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“Imagine all the time we had was bottled up, like wine. and handed over to us. How would we make that bottle last? By sipping slowly, appreciating the taste, or by gulping?”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“It fascinated me how depression and anxiety overlap with post-traumatic stress disorder. Had we been through some trauma we didn’t know about? Was the noise and speed of modern life the trauma for our caveman brains? Was I that soft? Or was life a kind of war most people didn’t see?”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“Just when you feel you have no time to relax, know that this is the moment you most need to make time to relax.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“Life is so infinitely hard. It involves a thousand tasks all at once. And I am a thousand different people, all fleeing away from the centre.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“Life is waiting for you. You might be stuck here for a while, but the world isn’t going anywhere. Hang on in there if you can. Life is always worth it.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“Maybe love is just about finding the person you can be your weird self with.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“Once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“One cliché attached to bookish people is that they are lonely, but for me books were my way out of being lonely. If you are the type of person who thinks too much about stuff then there is nothing lonelier in the world than being surrounded by a load of people on a different wavelength.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“People place so much value on thought, but feeling is as essential. I want to read books that make me laugh and cry and fear and hope and punch the air in triumph. I want a book to hug me or grab me by the scruff of my neck. I don’t even mind if it punches me in the gut. Because we are here to feel.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“People with mental illnesses aren’t wrapped up in themselves because they are intrinsically any more selfish than other people. Of course not. They are just feeling things that can’t be ignored. Things that point the arrows inward.” (Reasons to Stay Alive Quotes)
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“Read a book without thinking about finishing it. Just read it. Enjoy every word, sentence, and paragraph. Don’t wish for it to end, or for it to never end.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“So every human inhabitant on this freak wonder of a planet shares the same core. I am you and you are me. We are alone, but not alone. We are trapped by time, but also infinite. Made of flesh, but also stars.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“So most of what we know now will be disproved or reassessed in the future. That is how science works, not through blind faith, but continual doubt.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“Stigma is particularly cruel for depressives, because stigma affects thoughts and depression is a disease of thoughts.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“That’s the odd thing about depression and anxiety. It acts like an intense fear of happiness, even as you yourself consciously want that happiness more than anything. So if it catches you smiling, even fake smiling, then – well, that stuff’s just not allowed and you know it, so here comes ten tons of counterbalance.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“The 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. You can walk through a storm and feel the wind but you know you are not the wind.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“The main advantage of books over life is that they can be redrafted and redrafted, whereas life, alas, is always a first draft.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“The World is increasingly designed to depress us. Happiness isn’t very good for the economy. If we were happy with what we had, why would we need more? How do you sell an anti-ageing moisturiser? You make someone worry about ageing. How do you get people to vote for a political party? You make them worry about immigration. How do you get them to buy insurance? By making them worry about everything. How do you get them to have plastic surgery? By highlighting their physical flaws. How do you get them to watch a TV show? By making them worry about missing out. How do you get them to buy a new smartphone? By making them feel like they are being left behind. To be calm becomes a kind of revolutionary act. To be happy with your own non-upgraded existence. To be comfortable with our messy, human selves, would not be good for business.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.’ Experience surrounds innocence and innocence can never be regained once lost.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“There is no standard normal. Normal is subjective. There are seven billion versions of normal on this planet.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“There is this idea that you either read to escape or you read to find yourself.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“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
Reasons to Stay Alive
“Three in the morning is never the time to try and sort out your life.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“To other people, it sometimes seems like nothing at all. You are walking around with your head on fire and no one can see the flames.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“Unlike a book or a film depression doesn’t have to be about something.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“We are all potential depressives, but that is never going to be all we are.” (Reasons to Stay Alive Quotes)
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“We humans might have evolved too far. 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
Reasons to Stay Alive
“What doesn’t kill you very often makes you weaker. What doesn’t kill you can leave you limping for the rest of your days. What doesn’t kill you can make you scared to leave your house, or even your bedroom, and have you trembling, or mumbling incoherently, or leaning with your head on a window pane, wishing you could return to the time before the thing that didn’t kill you.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“When you are depressed you feel alone, and that no one is going through quite what you are going through. You are so scared of appearing in any way mad you internalise everything, and you are so scared that people will alienate you further you clam up and don’t speak about it, which is a shame, as speaking about it helps.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“Wherever you are, at any moment, try and find something beautiful. A face, a line out of a poem, the clouds out of a window, some graffiti, a wind farm. Beauty cleans the mind.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“You are no less or more of a man or a woman or a human for having depression than you would be for having cancer or cardiovascular disease or a car accident.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“You are walking around with your head on fire and no one can see the flames.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“You can be a depressive and be happy, just as you can be a sober alcoholic.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
“Your mind is a galaxy. More dark than light. But the light makes it worthwhile. Which is to say, don’t kill yourself. Even when the darkness is total. Always know that life is not still. Time is space. You are moving through that galaxy. Wait for the stars.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
