Book Quotes — The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

October 2020.

I’m not sure how I came across this book, but I think it was via seeing something on Instagram. A couple of months back I've decided to manoeuvre away from self-help books into fiction and this book magically appeared into my life.

I don't know the full story of the author, but in one Instagram post of his, he mentioned that he was celebrating x years of recovery for deciding to live. I believe he went through a suicide attempt experience, which is always somewhat awakening in itself.

The Midnight Library is about a woman called Nora, who decides to take her life as she was full of regrets and started to get to the place where life didn’t make sense anymore. She felt empty, her life had been empty walking around, faking some kind of human normality like a sentient mannequin of despair. Just the bare bones of getting through.

She ends up in The Midnight Library where she is presented with endless life possibilities. Nora receives the instructions of how The Midnight Life works from her old teacher and she takes her through multiple life experiences for Nora to ultimately decide that she does, after all, wants to live.

It’s an emotional rollercoaster and a beautiful reminder for the fact that we have one life and might as well do our best in living it in an authentic way of our own. No regrets! That’s a good start.

QUOTES — The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

• Between life and earth, there is a library and within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices… Would you have done anything differently, if you had the chance to undo your regrets
• Every life contains many millions of decisions. Some big, some small, but every time one decision is taken over another, the outcomes differ. An irreversible variation occurs.
• She was scared to be married because deep down she was scared to become her mother, she didn~t want to replicate her parent's marriage.
• Want is an interesting word. IT means lack. Sometimes if we FIL that lack with something else the original want disappears entirely. Maybe you have a lack of problem rather than a want problem. Maybe there is a slide that you really want to live in.
• Sometimes, the only way to to learn is to live.
• The lonely mind in the busy city yearns for connection because it thinks human. to human connection is the point of everything.
• Once you sense that vastness of life, hope emerges
• Nora had always had the sense that she came from a long line of regrets and crushed hopes that seemed to echo in every generation.
• She had a problem accepting herself. She would have the sense that she wasn’t enough. What it would be like to accept herself completely. Every mistake she had ever made. Every mark on her body. Every dream she hadn’t reached or pain she had felt.
• Sometimes just to say your own truth out loud is enough to find others like you. You are only limited by your imagination. You can be very creative with the regrets you want to undo.
• You need to pick the life you would be most happy inside. Life could be worth living, if only you found the right one to exist inside.
• There is no rejection, there is the only redirection. Action leading to a reaction. Every second of every day we are entering a new universe. And we spend so much time wishing our lives were different, comparing ourselves to other people and to other versions of ourselves when really most lives contain degrees of good and degrees of bad. Simply Living. If your life isn't working, you have to ask why. We had time to breathe.
• I always had to do what my parents wanted me to do in order to impress them. Sibling rivalry isn’t about siblings but parents. I always felt my parents just encouraged my sisters dreams a bit more. You might need to stop worrying about other peoples approval. You don't need a permission slip to be yourself. Every life she has tried so far since entering the library had been someone else’s dream.
• Never underestimate the big importance of small things.
• Undoing regrets was really a way of making sides come true.
• You don't have to understand life, you just have to live it.
• When you have worries about things you don't know about, like the future, its a very good idea to remind yourself of things you do know. The more she relaxed into it, the more things came to her.

You could eat in the finest restaurants, you could partake in every sensual pleasure, you could sing on stage in São Paulo to twenty thoughts and people, you could soak up whole thunderstorms of applause you could travel to the ends of the Earth, you could be followed by millions on the internet, you could win Olympic medals, but this was all meaningless without love.

The thing that had left her vulnerable, was the absence of love. She had loved no one, and no one had loved her back. She had been empty, her life had been empty, walking around, faking some kind of human normality like a sentient mannequin of despair. Just the bare bone of getting through. The terrifying power of caring deeply and being cared for deeply. There was a net of love to break her fall.

A thin I have learned

Written by a nobody who has been everybody

It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living in. Easy to wish we would develop other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we would work harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.

It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn~t make and the work we didn’t do and the people we didn’t marry and the children we didn’t have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret and keep regretting, ad infinitude until our time runs out.

But it is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other peoples worst enemy. We. can't tell if any of those other versions would have been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.

Of course, we can't visit every place or meet every person or do every job, yet most of what we would feel in any life is still available. We don't have to p.lay every game to know what winning feels like. We don't have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. We don't have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies.

We just have to close our eyes and savour the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays. We are as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum. We only need to be one person. We only need to feel one existence. We don~t have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility.

So let~s be kind to the people in our own existence. Let’s occasionally look up from the spot in which we are because, wherever we happen to be standing, the sky above goes on forever. Yesterday I knew I had no future, and that is was impossible for me to accept my life as it is now. And yet today, that same messy life seems full of hope. Potential

The impossible, I suppose, happens via living. Will, my life be miraculously free from pain, despair, grief, heartbreak, hardship, loneliness, depress. No. But do I want to live? Yes. A thousand times. Yes.

NEXT

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