“There was this coffee shop we used to go to, at the university. We’d just sit together, together but silent. Happy silent. Reading newspapers, drinking coffee. It was hard to avoid places like that. We used to walk around everywhere. His troublesome soul lingered on every street… I kept telling his memory to piss the fuck off but it wouldn’t. Grief is a bastard. If I’d have stayed any longer, I’d have hated humanity. So, when a research position came up in Svalbard I was like, yes, this has come to save me… I wanted to be somewhere he had never been. I wanted somewhere where I didn’t have to feel his ghost. But the truth is, it only half works, you know? Places are places and memories are memories and life is fucking life.”
Matt Haig, The Midnight Library (Page 120)
“She had always imagined her parents were too proud to get divorced, so instead let their resentments fester inside, projecting them onto their children, and Nora in particular. And swimming had been her only ticket to approval. Here, in this life she was in now, she had pursued a career to keep him happy, while sacrificing her own relationships, her own love of music, her own dreams beyond anything that didn’t involve a medal, her own life.”
Matt Haig, The Midnight Library (Page 98)
“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)
“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)
“‘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)
“To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three-parts dead.”
Bertrand Russell, via The Midnight Library (Page 36)
“She wondered if her parents had ever been in love or if they had got married because marriage was something you did at the appropriate time with the nearest available person. A game where you grabbed the first person you could find when the music stopped. She had never wanted to play that game.”
Matt Haig, The Midnight Library (Page 36)
“The universe tended towards chaos and entropy. That was basic thermodynamics. Maybe it was basic existence too.”
Matt Haig, The Midnight Library (Page 12)
“She’d been feeling lonely. And though she’d studied enough existential philosophy to believe loneliness was a fundamental part of being a human in an essentially meaningless universe, it was good to see him.”
Matt Haig, The Midnight Library (Page 5)
The Midnight Library [Book]
Book Overview: Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? Would any of these other lives truly be better? In The Midnight Library, Matt Haig’s enchanting blockbuster novel, Nora Seed finds herself faced with this decision. Faced with the possibility of changing her life for a new one, following a different career, undoing old breakups, realizing her dreams of becoming a glaciologist; she must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place.