The Midnight Library

By Matt Haig

 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, which in turn
leads to further variations.
 You have as many lives as you have possibilities. There are lives where you make different
choices. And those choices lead to different outcomes. If you had done just one thing differently,
you would have a different life story.
 Doing one thing differently is often the same as doing everything differently. Actions can’t be
reversed within a lifetime, however much we try
 Everyone’s lives could have ended up an infinite number of ways.
 The Only Way to Learn Is to Live
 Sometimes regrets aren’t based on fact at all. Sometimes regrets are just . . .’ She searched for the
appropriate term and found it. ‘A load of bullshit.’
 Most gossip is envy in disguise.
 The thing is . . . what we consider to be the most successful route for us to take, actually isn’t.
Because too often our view of success is about some external bullshit idea of achievement–an
Olympic medal, the ideal husband, a good salary. And we have all these metrics that we try and
reach. When really success isn’t something, you measure, and life isn’t a race you can win. It’s all
. . . bollocks. But the truth is that success is a delusion. It’s all a delusion. I mean, yes, there are
things we can overcome. For instance, I am someone who gets stage fright and yet, here I am, on
a stage. Look at me . . . on a stage! And someone told me recently, they told me that my problem
isn’t actually stage fright. My problem is life fright. And you know what? They’re fucking right.
Because life is frightening, and it is frightening for a reason, and the reason is that it doesn’t
matter which branch of a life we get to live, we are always the same rotten tree. I wanted to be
many things in my life. All kinds of things. But if your life is rotten, it will be rotten no matter
what you do. The damp rots the whole useless thing . . .’
 Anyway, just be kind and . . . Just be kind.
 If one advances confidently,’ Thoreau had written in Walden, ‘in the direction of his dreams, and
endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in
common hours.’ He’d also observed that part of this success was the product of being alone. ‘I
never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.
 In her nocturnal and suicidal hours, that solitude was the problem. But that was because it hadn’t
been true solitude. The lonely mind in the 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
wildness’ 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. And between her and herself.
 The quiet made her realize how much noise there was elsewhere in the world. Here, noise had
meaning. You heard something and you had to pay attention.
 To be a human was to continually dumb the world down into an understandable story that keeps
things simple.
 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.
 It would have made things a lot easier if we understood there was no way of living that can
immunize you against sadness. And that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness.
You can’t have one without the other. Of course, they come in different degrees and quantities.
But there is no life where you can be in a state of sheer happiness for ever. And imagining there is
just breeds more unhappiness in the life you’re in.
 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. That, she supposed, was the basis of
depression as well as the difference between fear and despair.
 We only know 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.”’
 People only see the truth if it is close enough to their reality.
 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