The Midnight Library (Matt Haig)
- Your Highlight on Location 228-229 | Added on Tuesday, November 8, 2022 11:35:33 PM
The universe tended towards chaos and entropy. That was basic thermodynamics. Maybe it was basic existence too.
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The Midnight Library (Matt Haig)
- Your Highlight on Location 348-349 | Added on Tuesday, November 8, 2022 11:46:54 PM
She imagined being a non-sentient life form sitting in a pot all day was probably an easier existence.
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The Midnight Library (Matt Haig)
- Your Highlight on Location 854-855 | Added on Saturday, November 12, 2022 3:05:37 PM
Do you ever think ‘how did I end up here?’ Like you are in a maze and totally lost and it’s all your fault because you were the one who made every turn?
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The Midnight Library (Matt Haig)
- Your Highlight on Location 885-888 | Added on Saturday, November 12, 2022 3:11:38 PM
I want to die.’ Mrs Elm studied Nora hard, as if reading a passage in a book she had read before but had just found it contained a new meaning. ‘Want,’ she told her, in a measured tone, ‘is an interesting word. It means lack. Sometimes if we fill that lack with something else the original want disappears entirely. Maybe you have a lack problem rather than a want problem. Maybe there is a life that you really want to live.’
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The Midnight Library (Matt Haig)
- Your Highlight on Location 933-934 | Added on Saturday, November 12, 2022 3:17:04 PM
‘I wasn’t lying. I asked you what your cat’s name was. I never said I didn’t know what your cat’s name was. Do you understand the difference?
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The Midnight Library (Matt Haig)
- Your Highlight on Location 1178-1178 | Added on Sunday, November 13, 2022 2:43:17 PM
you can choose choices but not outcomes.
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The Midnight Library (Matt Haig)
- Your Highlight on Location 1183-1185 | Added on Sunday, November 13, 2022 2:44:02 PM
tests with zebrafish. They had a fish tank and they drew a horizontal line on the side of it, halfway down, in marker pen. Depressed fish stayed below the line. But give those same fish Prozac and they go above the line, to the top of their tanks, darting about like new.
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The Midnight Library (Matt Haig)
- Your Highlight on Location 1189-1192 | Added on Sunday, November 13, 2022 2:45:23 PM
Maybe even suicide would have been too active. Maybe in some lives you just float around and expect nothing else and don’t even try to change. Maybe that was most lives. ‘Yes,’ said Nora, aloud now. ‘Maybe I got stuck. Maybe in every life I am stuck. I mean, maybe that’s just who I am. A starfish in every life is still a starfish. There isn’t a life where a starfish is a professor of aerospace engineering.
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The Midnight Library (Matt Haig)
- Your Highlight on Location 1867-1868 | Added on Tuesday, November 15, 2022 2:17:58 PM
To be part of nature was to be part of the will to live.
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The Midnight Library (Matt Haig)
- Your Highlight on Location 1868-1871 | Added on Tuesday, November 15, 2022 2:18:33 PM
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.
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The Midnight Library (Matt Haig)
- Your Highlight on Location 2059-2060 | Added on Tuesday, November 15, 2022 2:36:59 PM
To be a human was to continually dumb the world down into an understandable story that keeps things simple.
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The Midnight Library (Matt Haig)
- Your Highlight on Location 2900-2905 | Added on Thursday, November 17, 2022 11:34:16 PM
In another life Nora was a sea of emotion. She felt everything deeply and directly. Every joy and every sorrow. A single moment could contain both intense pleasure and intense pain, as if both were dependent on each other, like a pendulum in motion. A simple walk outside and she could feel a heavy sadness simply because the sun had slipped behind a cloud. Yet, conversely, meeting a dog who was clearly grateful for her attention caused her to feel so exultant that she felt she could melt into the pavement with sheer bliss. In that life she had a book of Emily Dickinson poems beside her bed and she had a playlist called ‘Extreme States of Euphoria’ and another one called ‘The Glue to Fix Me When I Am Broken’.
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The Midnight Library (Matt Haig)
- Your Highlight on Location 2945-2946 | Added on Thursday, November 17, 2022 11:38:56 PM
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.
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The Midnight Library (Matt Haig)
- Your Highlight on Location 3670-3671 | Added on Monday, November 21, 2022 2:33:06 PM
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.
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The Midnight Library (Matt Haig)
- Your Highlight on Location 3846-3847 | Added on Monday, November 21, 2022 2:48:03 PM
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.
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The Midnight Library (Matt Haig)
- Your Highlight on Location 3857-3859 | Added on Monday, November 21, 2022 8:57:35 PM
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.
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The Midnight Library (Matt Haig)
- Your Highlight on Location 3879-3881 | Added on Monday, November 21, 2022 8:59:53 PM
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.
