Reasons to Stay Alive Quotes

“One cliche attached to bookish people is that they are lonely, but for me books were my way out of being lonely.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“We are all potential depressives, but that is never going to be all we are.”
― 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. Words—spoken or written—are what connect us to the world, and so speaking about it to people, and writing about this stuff, helps connect us to each other, and to our true selves.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“You need to feel life’s terror to feel its wonder.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“The object of art is to give life a shape,”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“Einstein said the way to understand relativity was to imagine the difference between love and pain. “When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“Medication is an incredibly attractive concept. Not just for the person with depression, or the person running a pharmaceutical firm, but for society as a whole. It underlines the idea we have hammered into us by the hundred thousand TV ads we have seen that everything can be fixed by consuming things.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“I suppose, in the absence of universal certainties, we are our own best laboratory.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“A SIDE EFFECT OF depression is sometimes to become obsessed with the functioning of your brain.”
― 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 need to be uncomfortable. You need to hurt. As the Persian poet Rumi wrote in the twelfth century, “The wound is the place where the light enters you.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“The weird thing about depression is that, even though you might have more suicidal thoughts, the fear of death remains the same.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“Life is the people who love you. No one will ever choose to stay alive for an iPhone. It's the people we reach via the iPhone that mater.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“I feel the sheer unfathomable marvel that is this strange life we have, here on earth, the seven billion of us, clustered in our towns and cities on this pale blue dot of a planet, spending our allotted 30,000 days as best we can, in glorious insignificance.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“Willie Nelson once said that sometimes, you have to either write a song or you kick your foot through a window. The third option , I suppose , is that you write a book.”
― 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.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“The way out is never through yourself.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“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. The key is in accepting your thoughts, all of them, even the bad ones. Accept thoughts, but don’t become them.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“Yet people still don't think depression really that bad. If they did, they wouldn't say the things they say.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“How to live (forty pieces of advice I feel to be helpful but which I don’t always follow)

1. Appreciate happiness when it is there

2. Sip, don’t gulp.

3. Be gentle with yourself. Work less. Sleep more.

4. There is absolutely nothing in the past that you can change. That’s basic physics.

5. Beware of Tuesdays. And Octobers.

6. Kurt Vonnegut was right. “Reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found.”

7. Listen more than you talk.

8. Don’t feel guilty about being idle. More harm is probably done to the world through work than idleness. But perfect your idleness. Make it mindful.

9. Be aware that you are breathing.

10. Wherever you are, at any moment, try to 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.

11. Hate is a pointless emotion to have inside you. It is like eating a scorpion to punish it for stinging you.

12. Go for a run. Then do some yoga.

13. Shower before noon.

14. Look at the sky. Remind yourself of the cosmos. Seek vastness at every opportunity, in order to see the smallness of yourself.

15. Be kind.

16. Understand that thoughts are thoughts. If they are unreasonable, reason with them, even if you have no reason left. You are the observer of your mind, not its victim.

17. Do not watch TV aimlessly. Do not go on social media aimlessly. Always be aware of what you are doing and why you are doing it. Don’t value TV less. Value it more. Then you will watch it less. Unchecked distractions will lead you to distraction.

18. Sit down. Lie down. Be still. Do nothing. Observe. Listen to your mind. Let it do what it does without judging it. Let it go, like Snow Queen in Frozen.

19. Don’t’ worry about things that probably won’t happen.

20. Look at trees. Be near trees. Plant trees. (Trees are great.)

21. Listen to that yoga instructor on YouTube, and “walk as if you are kissing the earth with your feet”.

22. Live. Love. Let go. The three Ls.

23. Alcohol maths. Wine multiplies itself by itself. The more you have, the more you are likely to have. And if it is hard to stop at one glass, it will be impossible at three. Addition is multiplication.

24. 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.

25. 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.

26. No drug in the universe will make you feel better, at the deepest level, than being kind to other people.

27. Listen to what Hamlet – literature’s most famous depressive – told Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

28. If someone loves you, let them. Believe in that love. Live for them, even when you feel there is no point.

29. You don’t need the world to understand you. It’s fine. Some people will never really understand things they haven’t experienced. Some will. Be grateful.

30. Jules Verne wrote of the “Living Infinite”. This is the world of love and emotion that is like a “sea”. If we can submerge ourselves in it, we find infinity in ourselves, and the space we need to survive.

31. Three in the morning is never the time to try and sort out your life.

32. Remember that there is nothing weird about you. You are just a human, and everything you do and feel is a natural thing, because we are natural animals. You are nature. You are a hominid ape. You are in the world and the world is in you. Everything connects.

33. Don’t believe in good or bad, or winning and losing, or victory and defeat, or ups and down. At your lowest and your highest, whether you are happy or despairing or calm or angry, there is a kernel of you that stays the same. That is the you that matters.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“Nothing makes you feel smaller, more trivial, than such a vast transformation
inside your own mind while the world carries on, oblivious. Yet nothing is more freeing. To accept your smallness in the world.”
― 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. It is not where we are but where we want to go and all that. 'Is there no way out of the mind?' Sylvia Plath famously asked. I had been interested in this question (what it means, what the answers might be) ever since I had come across it as a teenager n a book of quotations. If there is a way out, a way that isn't death itself, then the exit route is through books. But rather than leave the mind entirely, words help us leave a mind, and give is the building blocks to build another one, similar but better, nearby to the old one with firmer foundations and very often a better view.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“Maybe we should be looking at how we live, and how our minds weren’t made for the lives we lead. Human brains – in terms of cognition and emotion and consciousness – are essentially the same as they were at the time of Shakespeare or Jesus or Cleopatra or the Stone Age. They are not evolving with the pace of change. Neolithic humans never had to face emails or breaking news or pop-up ads or Iggy Azalea videos or a self-service checkout at a strip-lit Tesco Metro on a busy Saturday night. Maybe instead of worrying about upgrading technology and slowly allowing ourselves to be cyborgs we should have a little peek at how we could upgrade our ability to cope with all this change.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“I read and read and read with an intensity i'd never really known before. I mean, Id always considered myself to be a person who liked books. But there is a difference between liking books and needing them. I needed books. They weren't a luxury good during that time in my life. They were a Class A addictive substance. I'd certainly fallen deeper into the worlds conjured on the page. 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

“If pills work for you it doesn't really matter if this is to do with serotonin or another process or anything else.- keep taking them. Hell, if licking wallpaper does it for you, do that. I am not anti pill. I am pro anything that works and I know pill do work for a lot of people.”
― 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

“So the fact that this book exists is proof that depression lies. Depression makes you think things that are wrong.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“The sense of being physically empty, of dissolving, of being a ghost whose existence was sourced by electric anxiety. And it became hard to breathe. The air thinned. It took massive concentration just to keep control of my breathing.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“Actually, depression can be exacerbated by things being all right externally, because the gulf between what you are feeling and what you are expected to feel becomes larger.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“Another thing. Stimulation. Excitement. The kinds found in new places. Sometimes this can be terrifying, but it can also be liberating. In a familiar place, your mind focuses solely on itself. There is nothing new it needs to notice about your bedroom. No potential external threats, just internal ones. By forcing yourself into a new physical space, preferably in a different country, you end up inevitably focusing a bit more on the world outside your head.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons To Stay Alive