Cassandra

“It is easy to mourn the lives we aren't living. Easy to wish we'd developed other other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we'd worked 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 the people 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 infinitum, until our time runs out.
But it is not 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.
We can't tell if any of those other versions would of 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.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“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.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Ci sentiamo in colpa perchè non leggiamo abbastanza, perchè parliamo troppo poco con gli amici, perchè trascorriamo troppo poco tempo con i figli, con i vecchi. Siamo sempre in movimento invece di fermarci ad ascoltare la pioggia, bere una tazza di caffè, scaldare un petto. E non scriviamo mai lettere.”
― Jón Kalman Stefánsson, Luce d'estate, ed è subito notte

“You can have everything and feel nothing.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library