The Midnight Library
by Matt Haig
(Canongate, 2020)
Since her brother had left, she’d felt a bit unguarded out there. The library was a little shelter of civilisation.
Page 2.
Someone, for whatever peculiar reason, rang her doorbell.
Page 5.
This had sounded funnier in her head than it did as actual words being vocalised out of her mouth.
Page 6.
The town was a conveyor belt of despair.
Page 12.
The universe tended towards chaos and entropy. That was basic thermodynamics. Maybe it was basic existence too.
You lose your job, then more shit happens.
Page 12.
She wished there were nothing but doors ahead of her, which she could walk through one by one, leaving everything behind.
Page 16.
Happy moments can turn into pain, given time.
Page 21.
“I miss you,” she said into the air, as if the spirits of every person she’d loved were in the room with her.
Page 22.
“You don’t go to death. Death comes to you.”
Page 29.
“Everyone’s lives could have ended up an infinite number of ways. These books on the shelves are your life, all starting from the same point in time.”
Page 33.
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.
Page 36.
“If you have found a life you truly want to live, then you get to lie it until you die of old age.”
Page 39.
A person was like a city. You couldn’t let a few less desirable parts put you off the whole.
Page 48.
Thomas Hobbes had viewed memory and imagination as pretty much the same thing, and since discovering that she had never entirely trusted her memories.
Page 53.
The wind was picking up, howling through trees as if attempting a language.
Page 56.
“Sometimes the only way to learn is to live.”
Page 67.
It turned out to be near impossible to stand in a library and not want to pull things from the shelves.
Page 68.
“Death is the opposite of possibility.”
Page 69.
“You can choose choices but not outcomes.”
Page 83.
“Librarians have knowledge. They guide you to the right books. The right worlds. They find the best places. Like soul-enhanced search engines.”
Page 84.
Nora had no idea what success was. She had felt like a failure for so long.
Page 85.
Regrets don’t leave. They weren’t mosquito bites. They itch for ever.
Page 85.
“Never underestimate the big importance of small things.”
Page 86.
“The straightforward is never quite what it seems.”
Page 87.
Grief is a bastard.
Page 120.
“I wanted to be somewhere he had never been. I wanted somewhere where I didn’t have to feel his ghost.”
Page 120.
Almost everything she had done in her life, she realised - almost everything she had bought and worked for and consumed - had taken her further away from understanding that she and all humans were really just one of nine million species.
Page 126.
The lonely mind in a busy city yearns for connection because it thinks human-to-human connection is the point of everything. But amid pure nature (or the ‘tonic of wilderness’ as Thoreau called it) solitude took on a different character. It became in itself a kind of connection. A connection between herself and the world. A between her and herself.
Page 126.
When you stay too long in a place, you forget just how big an expanse the world is.
Page 134.
The life of a human, according to the Scottish philosopher David Hume, was of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster.
Page 139.
To be a human was to continually dumb the world down into an understandable story that keeps things simple.
Pages 148-149.
“Minds can’t see what they can’t handle.”
Page 149.
“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.”
Page 179.
“It seems impossible to live without hurting people.”
Page 186.
The thing that looks the most ordinary might end up being the thing that leads you to victory.
Page 188.
No player should give up if there were pieces still left on the board.
Page 194.
Where there were books, there was always the temptation to open them.
Page 196.
She could tell the kind of person she was from the way people spoke to her.
Page 198.
She had known three types of silence in relationships. There was passive-aggressive silence, obviously, there was the we-no-longer-have-anything-to-say-silence, and then there was the silence that Eduardo and she seemed to have cultivated. The silence of not needing to talk.
Page 210.
She realised that she hadn’t tried to end her life because she was miserable, but because she had managed to convince herself that there was no way out of her misery.
Page 215.
“We only now what we perceive. Everything we experience is ultimately just our perception of it. ‘It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.’”
Page 219.
Since entering the Midnight Library Nora had slowly got used to the peculiar.
Page 221.
It was a curious fact that no matter how many lives she had experienced, and no matter how different those lives were, she almost always had her pone by the bed.
Page 222.
You could be as honest as possible in life, but people only see the truth if it is close enough to their reality.
Page 242.
What sometimes feels like a trap is actually just a trick of the mind.
Page 269.
It is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy.
Page 277.
It was interesting, she mused to herself, how life sometimes simply gave you a whole new perspective by waiting around long enough for you to see it.
Pages 280-281.
The paradox of volcanoes was that they were symbols of destruction but also life.
Page 286.