Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

“Be a mystery, not a demographic. Be someone a computer could never quite know.”
― Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet

“To be a part of nature was to be part of the will to live. When you stay too long in a place, you forget just how big an expanse the world is. You get no sense of the length of those longitudes and latitudes. Just as, she supposed, it is hard to have a sense of the vastness inside any one person. But once you sense that vastness, once something reveals it, hope emerges, whether you want it to or not, and it clings to you as stubbornly as lichen clings to rock.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“I stared at the tweet I was about to post. It wasn't going to add anything to my life. Or anyone else's life. It was just going to lead to more checking of my phone, like Pepys with his pocket watch. I pressed delete, and felt a strange relief as I watch each letter disappear.”
― Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet

“A gap in the fire that was consuming every other book on the shelf.
I don't want to die.
She had to try harder. She had to want the life she always thought she didn't. Because just as this library was a part of her, so too were all the other lives. She might not have felt everything she had felt in those lives, but she had the capability. She might have missed those particular opportunities that led her to become an Olympic swimmer, or a traveller, or a vineyard owner, or a rock star, or a planet-saving glaciologist, or a Cambridge graduate, or a mother, or the million other things, but she was still in some way all those people. They were all her. She could have been all those amazing things, and that wasn't depressing, as she had once thought. Not at all. It was inspiring. Because now she saw the kinds of things she could do when she put herself to work. And that, actually, the life she had been living had its own logic to it. Her brother was alive. Izzy was alive. And she had helped a young boy stay out of trouble. What sometimes feels like a trap is actually just a trick of the mind. She didn't need a vineyard or a Californian sunset to be happy. She didn't even need a large house and the perfect family. She just needed potential. And she was nothing if not potential. She wondered why she had never seen it before.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“She heard Mrs. Elm's voice, from under the table somewhere far behind her, cutting through the noise.
'Don't give up! Don't you dare give up, Nora Seed!'
She didn't want to die. And she didn't want to live any other life than the one that was hers. The one that could be a messy struggle, but it was her messy struggle. A beautiful messy struggle.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Flinching at the heat, and with a careful index finger, she hooked the top of the spine and pulled the book from the shelf. She then did what she always did. She opened the book and tried to find the first page. But the only difficulty was that there was no first page. There were no words in the entire book. It was completely blank. Like the other books, this was the book of her future. But unlike the others, in this one that future was unwritten.
So, this was it. This was her life. Her root life.
And it was a blank page.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“The other books on the shelf had become charcoal, and the hanging light bulb flickered through the dust, vaguely illuminating the fracturing ceiling. A large piece of ceiling around the light â€� roughly the shape of France â€� was looking ready to fall and crush her.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“She started to write. Nora wanted to live.
Once she'd finished the inscription she waited a moment. Frustratingly, nothing happened, and she remembered what Mrs. Elm had once said. Want is an interesting word. It means lack. So, she crossed that out and tried again.
Nora decided to live.
Nothing. She tried again.
Nora was ready to live.
Still nothing, even when she underlined the word 'live'. Everywhere now, there was breakage and ruination. The ceiling was falling, razing everything, smothering each of the bookshelves into piles of dust. She gaped over and saw the figure of Mrs. Elm, out from under the desk where she had been sheltering Nora, standing there without any fear at all then disappearing completely as the roof caved in almost everywhere, smothering remnants of fire and shelf stacks and all else.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“So she stopped trying to think about what to write and, in sheer exasperation, just put down the first thing that came to her, the thing that she felt inside her like a defiant silent roar that could overpower any external destruction. The one truth she had, a truth she was now proud of and please with, a truth she had not only come to terms with but welcomed openly, with every fiery molecule of her being. A truth that she scribbled hastily but firmly, pressing deep into the paper with the nib, in capital letters, in the first-person present tense.
A truth that was the beginning and seed of everything possible. A former curse and a present blessing.
Three simple words containing the power and potential of a multiverse.
I AM ALIVE.
And with that, the ground shook like fury and every last remnant of the Midnight Library dissolved into dust.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Choking, exhausted, dehydrated, struggling, trembling, heavy, delirious, pain in her chest, even more pain in her head, this was the worst life could feel, and yet it was life, and life was precisely what she wanted.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Life begins,' Sartre once wrote, 'on the other side of despair.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Nora decided to keep her experience of the Midnight Library to herself because she imagined that it wouldn't go down too well on a psychiatric evaluation form. It was safe to surmise the little-known realities of the multiverse probably weren't yet incorporated within the care plans of the National Health Service.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“The questions and answers continued for what felt like an hour. They covered medication, her mother's death, Volts, losing her job, money worries, the diagnosis of situational depression.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Through the window, after the nurse had gone, she watched the trees' gentle movements in the afternoon breeze and distant rush-hour traffic shunt slowly along Bedford ring road. It was nothing but trees and traffic and mediocre architecture, but it was also everything.
It was life.
A little later she deleted her suicidal social media posts, and â€� in a moment of sincere sentimentality â€� she wrote something else instead. She titled it 'A Thing I Learned (Written By A Nobody Who Has Been Everybody)'.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“It was good to see him. His thick eyebrows and reluctant smile still intact. He walked in a little awkward, head cowed, hair longer than it had been in the last two lives in which she had seen him.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“You're all I've got, sis,' he said, his voice cracking a little. 'I know I haven't valued you. I know I wasn't always the best, growing up. But I had my own shit going on. Having to be a certain way because of Dad. Hiding my sexuality. I know it wasn't easy for you but it wasn't easy for me either. You were good at everything. School, swimming, music. I couldn't compete...Plus Dad was Dad and I had to be this fake vision of whatever he thought a man was.' He sighed. 'It's weird. We both probably remember it in different ways. But don't leave me, okay? Leaving the band was one thing. But don't leave existence. I couldn't cope with that.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“She thought of the grief that had floored her when she had heard about Joe's death by overdose in São Paulo, and she asked him to hug her, and he obliged, delicately, and she felt the living warmth of him.
'Thanks for trying to jump in the river for me,' she said.
'What?'
'I always thought you didn't. But you tried. They pulled you back. Thank you.'
He suddenly knew what she was talking about. And maybe more than a little confused about how she knew this, when she had been swimming away from him. 'Ah, sis, I love you. We were young fools.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“As her brother headed towards the door of 33A Bancroft Avenue, Nora looked around at all the terraced houses and all the lampposts and trees under the sky, and she felt her lungs inflate at the wonder of being there, witnessing it all as if for the first time. Maybe in one of those houses was another slider, someone on their third or seventeenth or final version of themselves. She would look out for them.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Through his window Mr. Banerjee's face slowly lit up as he saw Nora safe and sound. He smiled and mouthed a 'thank you', as if simply her act of living was something he should be grateful for.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“And he smiled broader, and his eyes were full of kindness and concern, and Nora remembered what it was to care and be cared for.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Flowers she hadn't appreciated before, but which now mesmerized her with the most exquisite purple she had ever seen. As though the flowers weren't just colours but part of a language, notes in a glorious floral melody, as powerful as Chopin, silently communicating the breathtaking majesty of life itself.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“It is quite a revelation to discover that the place you wanted to escape to is the exact same place you escaped from. That the prison wasn't the place, but the perspective. And the most peculiar discovery Nora made was that, of all the extremely divergent variations of herself she had experienced, the most radical sense of change happened within the exact same life. The one she began and ended with.
This biggest and most profound shift happened not by becoming richer or more successful or more famous or by being amid the glaciers and polar bears of Svalbard. It happened by waking up in the exact same bed, in the same grotty damp apartment with its dilapidated sofa and yucca plant and tiny potted cacti and bookshelves and untried yoga manuals.
There was the same electric piano and books. There was the same sad absence of a feline and lack of a job. There was still the same unknowability about her life ahead.
And yet, everything was different.
And it was different because she no longer felt she was there simply to serve the dreams of other people. She no longer felt like she had to find sole fulfillment as some imaginary perfect daughter or sister or partner or wife or mother or employee or anything other than a human being, orbiting her own purpose, and answerable to herself.
And it was different because she was alive, when she had so nearly been dead. And because that had been her choice. A choice to live. Because she had touched the vastness of life and within that vastness she had seen the possibility not only of what she could do, but also feel. There were other scales and other tunes. There was more to her than a flat line of mild to moderate depression, spiced up with occasional flourishes of despair. And that gave her hope, and even the sheer sentimental gratitude of being able to be here, knowing she had the potential to enjoy watching radiant skies and mediocre Ryan Bailey comedies and be happy listening to music and conversation and beat of her own heart.
And it was different because, above all other things, that heavy and painful Book of Regrets had been successfully burnt to dust.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Hi Nora. It's me, Doreen.'
Nora was excited to hear from her, as she had been in the middle of nearly writing a notice advertising piano lessons. 'Oh Doreen! Can I just apologise about missing the lesson the other day?'
'Water under the bridge.'
'Well, I'm not going to go into all the reasons,' Nora continued, breathlessly. 'But I will just say that I will never be in that situation again. I promise, in future, should you want to continue with Leo's piano lessons, I will be where I am meant to be. I won't let you down. Now, I totally understand if you don't want me to be Leo's piano teacher any more. But I want you to know that Leo is an exceptional talent. He has a feel for the piano. He could end up making a career of it. He could end up at the Royal College of Music. So, I would just like to say if he doesn't continue his lessons with me, I want you to know that I feel he should continue them somewhere. That's all.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“And the moment Nora came off the phone she sat at the piano and played a tune that had never been played before. She liked what she was playing, and vowed to remember it and put some words to it. Maybe she could turn it into a proper song and put it out there online. Maybe she would write more songs.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“The paradox of volcanoes was that they were symbols of destruction but also life. Once the lava slows and cools, it solidifies and then breaks down over time to become soil â€� rich, fertile soil.
She wasn't a black hole, she decided. She was a volcano. And like a volcano she couldn't run away from herself. She'd have to stay there and tend to that wasteland.
She could plant a forest inside herself.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“It can be lonely,' Mrs. Elm said. 'Being here. Just sitting. I felt like the game was up. Like a lonely king on a board. You see, I don't know how you remember me, but outside of school I wasn't always theâ€�' She hesitated. 'I've let people down. I haven't always been easy. I've done things I regret. I was a bad wife. Not always a good mother, either. People have given up a little on me, and I don't entirely blame them.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Well, you were kind to me, Mrs....Louise. When I had a hard time at school, you always knew what to say.'
Mrs. Elm steadied her breath. 'Thank you, Nora.'
'And you're not alone on the board now. A pawn has come and joined you.'
'You were never a pawn.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“A slight smile tugged at the corners of her mouth.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Mrs. Elm's eyes sparkled with sudden life. 'Well, that's the beauty, isn't it? You just never know how it ends.'
And Nora smiled as she stared at all the pieces she still had left in play, thinking about her next move.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“A pawn is a
queen-in-waiting. All you need to do is
find a way to keep moving forward.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library