“If you aim to be something you are not, you will always fail. Aim to be you. Aim to look and act and think like you. Aim to be the truest version of you. Embrace that you-ness. Endorse it. Love it. Work hard at it. And don’t give a second thought when people mock it or ridicule it. Most gossip is envy in disguise. Keep your head down. Keep your stamina. Keep swimming…”
Matt Haig, The Midnight Library (Page 93)
Archives
“The thing she had once loved about swimming was the disappearing. In the water, her focus had been so pure that she thought of nothing else. Any school or home worries vanished. The art of swimming—she supposed like any art—was about purity. The more focused you were on the activity, the less focused you were on everything else. You kind of stopped being you and become the thing you were doing.”
Matt Haig, The Midnight Library (Page 72)
“Bliss has no counterpart. It is not a duality of pleasure and pain, day and night. It is nondual, it knows no opposite. It is a transcendence. Try to be more and more in the present. Don’t move too much in imagination and memory. Whenever you find yourself wandering into memory, into imagination, bring yourself back to the present, to what you are doing, to where you are, to who you are. Pull yourself back again and again to the present. Buddha has called it recollecting oneself; in that recollection by and by you will understand what eternity is.”
Osho, Everyday Osho (Page 191)
“‘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 (Page 67)
“The moment you decide you want that life, really want it, then everything that exists in your head now, will eventually be a memory so vague and intangible it will hardly be there at all.”
Matt Haig, The Midnight Library (Page 39)
“A writer — and, I believe, generally all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.”
Jorge Luis Borges
“There will never be a perfect time to do something that stretches you. That’s true whether you are starting a business, having a child, changing careers, or wrestling with any number of challenges. That’s not a license to be reckless and never think things through, but at some point you have to embrace the uncertainty because it is the only path forward. If you were ready for it, it wouldn’t be growth.”
James Clear