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Highlights

From How to Stop Time

By Matt Haig
She goes quiet for a little while. Remembers something. ‘“I speak the truth not so much as I would, but as much as I dare, and I dare a little more as I grow older.”’ ‘Is that . . .?’ ‘Montaigne himself.”
—Matt Haig, How to Stop Time. Highlighted
# growth # honesty # perspective
Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
—Matt Haig, How to Stop Time. Highlighted
# insignificance # perspective # self-concept
The lesson of history is that ignorance and superstition are things that can rise up, inside almost anyone, at any moment. And what starts as a doubt in a mind can swiftly become an act in the world.
—Matt Haig, How to Stop Time. Highlighted
# self-concept # growth # learning # perspective # resentment # conservatism # politics
It is a popular modern idea. That the inner us is something different to the outer us. That there is an authentic realer and better and richer version of ourselves which we can only tap into by buying a solution. This idea that we are separate from our nature, as separate as a bottle of Dior perform is from the plants of a forest.
—Matt Haig, How to Stop Time. Highlighted
# honesty # insignificance # habits # self-concept
But this is how I remember these things, and all we can ever be is faithful to our memories of reality, rather than the reality itself, which is something closely related but never precisely the same thing.
—Matt Haig, How to Stop Time. Highlighted
# memory # self-concept # self-experiments
Maybe someday soon we can try another park bench. I don’t know. I can’t know.
—Matt Haig, How to Stop Time. Highlighted
# insignificance # perspective # growth # friendship
Whenever I see someone reading a book, especially if it is someone I don’t expect, I feel civilization has become a little safer.
—Matt Haig, How to Stop Time. Highlighted
# reading # growth # character
There comes a time when the only way to start living is to tell the truth. To be who you really are, even if it is dangerous.
—Matt Haig, How to Stop Time. Highlighted
# honesty # intimacy # anxiety # vulnerability # growth
My mother was, in the tradition of parents, quite a complicated and contradictory human being. ... I never knew how many of her oddities had sprung from grief and how many from her own inherent nature.
—Matt Haig, How to Stop Time. Highlighted
# self-concept # parents # grief
But recently, now, I was starting to feel that you couldn’t do mathematics with emotions. In protecting yourself from hurt you could create a new, subtler type of pain.
—Matt Haig, How to Stop Time. Highlighted
# vulnerability # honesty # emotional
... A peck on the lips was not just a peck. ‘What was that for?’ I asked. I could just about see her smile in the moonlight. It wasn’t a flirtatious smile. It was a plain, matter-of-fact one. ‘For you to have something else to occupy your mind.’ ‘I am not sure I have ever met someone like you,’ I said.
—Matt Haig, How to Stop Time. Highlighted
# intimacy # vulnerability
‘You are not the only one with sorrows in this world. Don’t hoard them like they are precious. There is always plenty of them to go around.’
—Matt Haig, How to Stop Time. Highlighted
# grief # heartache
‘Music is about time,’ I told her. ‘It is about controlling time.’
—Matt Haig, How to Stop Time. Highlighted
# deep-connections
I looked at her for too long, and with too much intensity in my eyes. The way people never look at people any more. I wanted her in every sense. To want is to lack. That is what it means.
—Matt Haig, How to Stop Time. Highlighted
# intimacy # vulnerability # relationships # heartache