Ghadah > Ghadah's Quotes

“How to stop time: kiss.
How to travel in time: read.
How to escape time: music.
How to feel time: write.
How to release time: breathe.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“Maybe love is just about finding the person you can be your weird self with.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“There is this idea that you either read to escape or you read to find yourself.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“You will one day experience joy that matches this pain. You will cry euphoric tears at the Beach Boys, you will stare down at a baby’s face as she lies asleep in your lap, you will make great friends, you will eat delicious foods you haven’t tried yet, you will be able to look at a view from a high place and not assess the likelihood of dying from falling. There are books you haven’t read yet that will enrich you, films you will watch while eating extra-large buckets of popcorn, and you will dance and laugh and have sex and go for runs by the river and have late-night conversations and laugh until it hurts. Life is waiting for you. You might be stuck here for a while, but the world isn’t going anywhere. Hang on in there if you can. Life is always worth it.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“If you are the type of person who thinks too much about stuff then there is nothing lonelier in the world than being surrounded by a load of people on a different wavelength.”
― 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

“Three in the morning is never the time to try and sort out your life.”
― 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

“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

“A society which demands we be normal even as it drives us insane.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“I wanted to be dead. No. That's not quite right. I didn't want to be dead, I just didn't want to be alive.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“What doesn't kill you very often makes you weaker. What doesn't kill you can leave you limping for the rest of your days. What doesn't kill you can make you scared to leave your house, or even your bedroom, and have you trembling, or mumbling incoherently, or leaning with your head on a window pane, wishing you could return to the time before the thing that didn't kill you.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“Words, just sometimes, can set you free.”
― 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

“I didn't totally fit in. I kind of disintegrated around people and became what they wanted me to be. But paradoxically, I felt an intensity inside me all the time. I didn't know what it was, but it kept building, like water behind a dam. Later, when I was properly depressed and anxious, I saw the illness as an accumulation of all that thwarted intensity. A kind of breaking through. As though, if you find it hard enough to let your self be free, your self breaks in, flooding your mind in an attempt to drown all those failed half-versions of you.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“Goals are the source of misery. An unattained goal causes pain, but actually achieving it brings only a brief satisfaction.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“I hate depression. I am scared of it. Terrified, in fact. But at the same time, it has made me who I am. And if – for me – it is the price of feeling life, it’s a price always worth paying. I am satisfied just to be.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“So, as was often the case, a big fear was beaten by a bigger fear. The best way to beat a monster is to find a scarier one.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“It fascinated me how depression and anxiety overlap with post-traumatic stress disorder. Had we been through some trauma we didn't know about? Was the noise and speed of modern life the trauma for our caveman brains? Was I that soft? Or was life a kind of war most people didn't see?”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“Minds have their own weather systems. You are in a hurricane. Hurricanes run out of energy eventually. Hold on.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“Forcing yourself to see the world through love's gaze can be healthy. Love is an attitude to life. It can save us.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“I think that basically we are all helping people. All the time. Every time any of us speaks openly about mental health, we are helping normalize an illness that is still handled with protective goggles and safety gloves.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“Adding anxiety to depression is a bit like adding cocaine to alcohol. It presses fast-forward on the whole experience. If you have depression on its own your mind sinks into a swamp and loses momentum, but with anxiety in the cocktail, the swamp is still a swamp but the swamp now has whirlpools in it. The monsters that are there, in the muddy water, continually move like modified alligators at their highest speed. You are continually on guard. You are on guard to the point of collapse every single moment, while desperately trying to keep afloat, to breathe the air that the people on the bank all around you are breathing as easily as anything.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.’ Experience surrounds innocence and innocence can never be regained once lost.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive