Charlotte > Charlotte's Quotes

“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

“You can be a depressive and be happy, just as you can be a sober alcoholic.”
― 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

“MINDS ARE UNIQUE. They go wrong in unique ways. My mind went wrong in a slightly different way to how other minds go wrong. Our experience overlaps with other people's, but it is never exactly the same experience.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“Talk. Listen. Encourage talking. Encourage listening. Keep adding to the conversation. Stay on the lookout for those wanting to join in the conversation. Keep reiterating, again and again, that depression is not something you ‘admit to’, it is not something you have to blush about, it is a human experience.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“A society which demands we be normal even as it drives us insane.”
― 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

“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.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“The weirdest thing about a mind is that you can have the most intense things going on in there but no one else can see them. The world shrugs.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“We are all echoes of each other. We are all humans and feel both despair and happiness. Our similarities, as a species, are staggering. And our mental fragility is directly tied up with our humanity. We have nothing to be ashamed of in being human, any more than a tree should be ashamed of having branches. Let’s accept our own nature. Let’s be kind to ourselves and to each other. Let’s never add to the pain by blaming ourselves. We are all so weird that, really, none of us are. There are seven billion versions of strange on this freak wonder of a planet. We are all part of that. All freaks. All wonderful.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive