The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
Reading philosophy in essays and papers using drab academic language can get boring. A great author can distill complex philosophies into charming narratives. In The Midnight Library, Matt Haig has done precisely that. These messy notes are less notes of my own and more just great quotes I found through the read.
Messy notes:
“I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life.“ - Sylvia Plath
“The only way to learn is to live”
“You can choose choices, not outcomes”
Nora lived her dream in Australia and made the choice to go there. Outcome was the death of Izzy, which wasn’t Nora’s fault.
If your take on life is always outcome-based, then of course it’ll feel like you’re riding on a train you can’t stop
Get better at choosing
“Sometimes regrets aren’t based on fact at all. Sometimes regrets are… A load of bullshit.”
“Still staring blankly at The Book of Regrets, she wondered if her parents had ever been in love or if they had got married because marriage was something you did at the appropriate time with the nearest available person. A game where you grabbed the first person you could find when the music stopped. She had never wanted to play that game.”
“You see, doing one thing differently is very often the same as doing everything differently.”
“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, actually.”
Hard conceptions of success are largely bollocks. They’re more like goals. Is reaching your goals success? Or is success just a feeling? Is that feeling temporary or can it be sustained without grappling for more and more?
“If one advanced confidently, in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” and “I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude” - Henry David Thoreau
“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.”
“To be part of nature was to be part of the will to live. 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.”
“You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.” - Camus
“Never underestimate the big importance of small things.”
“It’s not what you look at that matters. It’s what you see.”
“It was interesting, she mused to herself, how life sometimes simply gave you a whole new perspective by waiting around long enough for you to see it.”
“You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it.”
“The prison wasn’t the place, but the perspective.”
“And it was different because she no longer felt she was there simply to serve the dreams of other people. She no longer felt like she had to find sole fulfillment as some imaginary perfect daughter or sister or partner or wife or mother or employee or anything other than a human being, orbiting her own purpose, and answer-able to herself.”