Notes on a Nervous Planet Quotes

“Reading isn’t important because it helps to get you a job. It’s important because it gives you room to exist beyond the reality you’re given. It is how humans merge. How minds connect. Dreams. Empathy. Understanding. Escape. Reading is love in action.”
― Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet

“Never be cool. Never try to be cool. Never worry what the cool people think. Head for the warm people. Life is warmth. You’ll be cool when you’re dead.”
― Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet

“Remember no one really cares what you look like. They care what they look like. You are the only person in the world to have worried about your face.”
― Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet

“And besides, libraries aren't just about books. They are one of the few public spaces we have left which don't like our wallets more than us.”
― Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet

“Happiness is not good for the economy.
We are encouraged, continually, to be a little bit dissatisfied with ourselves.”
― Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet

“We often find ourselves wishing for more hours in the day, but that wouldn't help anything. The problem, clearly, isn't that we have a shortage of time. It's more that we have an overload of everything else.”
― Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet

“I sometimes feel like my head is a computer with too many windows open. Too much clutter on the desktop. There is a metaphorical spinning rainbow wheel inside me. Disabling me. And if only I could find a way to switch off some of the frames, if only I could drag some of the clutter into the trash, then I would be fine. But which frame would I choose, when they all seem so essential? How can I stop my mind being overloaded when the world is overloaded? We can think about anything. And so it makes sense that we end up thinking about everything. We might have to, sometimes, be brave enough to switch the screens off in order to switch ourselves back on. To disconnect in order to reconnect.”
― Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet

“find a good book. And sit down and read it. There will be times in your life when you'll feel lost and confused. The way back to yourself is through reading. I want you to remember that. The more you read, the more you will know how to find your way through those difficult times.”
― Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet

“To enjoy life, we might have to stop thinking about what we will never be able to read and watch and say and do, and start to think of how to enjoy the world within our boundaries. To live on a human scale. To focus on the few things we can do, rather than the millions of things we can't. To not crave parallel lives. To find a smaller mathematics. To be a proud and singular one. An indivisible prime.”
― Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet

“Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything it is because we are dangerously near to wanting nothing.’ —Sylvia Plath”
― Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet

“Living with anxiety, turning up, and doing stuff with anxiety takes a strength most people will never know.”
― Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet

“Be a mystery, not a demographic. Be someone a computer could never quite know.”
― Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet

“The sky, like the sea, can anchor us. It says: hey, it’s okay, there is something bigger than your life that you are part of, and it’s – literally – cosmic.”
― Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet

“I feel we need to stop seeing mental and physical health as either/or and more as a both/and situation. There is no difference. We are mental. We are physical. We are not split up into unrelated sections. We are not an existential department store. We are everything at once.”
― Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet

“To see the act of learning as something not for its own sake but because of what it will get you reduces the wonder of humanity. We are thinking, feeling, art-making, knowledge-hungry, marvellous animals, who understand ourselves and our world through the act of learning. It is an end in itself. It has far more to offer than the things it lets us write on application forms. It is a way to love living right now.”
― Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet

“Maybe the point of life is to give up certainty and to embrace life’s beautiful uncertainty.”
― Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet

“And all this talk, over and over, of bravery: it would be nice one day if a public figure could talk about having depression without the media using words like 'incredible courage' and 'coming out'. Sure, it is well intentioned. But you shouldn't need to confess to having, say, anxiety. You should just be able to tell people. It's an illness. Like asthma or measles or meningitis. It's not a guilty secret. The shame people feel exacerbates symptoms. Yes, absolutely, people are often brave. But the bravery is in living with it, it shouldn't be in talking about it.”
― Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet

“The problem is not that the world is a mess, but that we expect it to be otherwise.”
― Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet

“When anger trawls the internet, Looking for a hook; It’s time to disconnect, And go and read a book.”
― Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet

“Don't compare your actual self to a hypothetical self. Don't drown in a sea of 'what ifs'. Don't clutter your mind by imagining other versions of you, in parallel universes where you made different decisions.”
― Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet

“It sometimes feels as if we have temporarily solved the problem of scarcity and replaced it with the problem of excess.”
― Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet

“Accept feelings and accept that they are just that: feelings.”
― Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet

“The world exists in you. Your experience of the world isn’t this objective unchangeable thing called ‘The World’. No. Your experience of the world is your interaction with it, your interpretation of it. To a certain degree we all make our own worlds. We read it in our own way. But also: we can, to a degree, choose what to read. We have to work out what about the world makes us feel sad or scared or confused or ill or calm or happy.”
― Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet

“How much extra happiness am I acquiring? Why am I wanting so much more than I need? Wouldn’t I be happier learning to appreciate what I already have?”
― Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet

“All a writer can do is provide a match, and hopefully a dry one. The reader has to strike the flame into being.”
― Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet

“Aim not to get more stuff done. Aim to have less stuff to do. Be a work minimalist. Minimalism is about doing more with less. So much of working life seems to be about doing less with more. Activity isn’t always the same as achievement.”
― Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet

“Don’t compare your actual self to a hypothetical self. Don’t drown in a sea of “what if” s. Don’t clutter your mind by imagining other versions of you, in parallel universes, where you made different decisions. The internet age encourages choice and comparison, but don’t do this to yourself. “Comparison is the thief of joy,” said Theodore Roosevelt. You are you. The past is the past. The only way to make a better life is from inside the present. To focus on regret does nothing but turn that very present into another thing you will wish you did differently. Accept your own reality. Be human enough to make mistakes. Be human enough not to dread the future. Be human enough to be, well, enough. Accepting where you are in life makes it so much easier to be happy for other people without feeling terrible about yourself.”
― Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet

“The whole of consumerism is based on us wanting the next thing rather than the present thing we already have. This is an almost perfect recipe for unhappiness.”
― Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet

“There is no panacea, or utopia, there is just love and kindness and trying, amid the chaos, to make things better where we can.”
― Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet

“Understand people are more than a social media post. Think how many conflicting thoughts you have in a day. Think of the different contradictory positions you have held in your life. Respond to online opinions but never let one rushed opinion define a whole human being. “Every one of us,” said the physicist Carl Sagan, “is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”
― Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet