The Humans is a laugh-and-cry book. Troubling, thrilling, puzzling, believable and impossible. Matt Haig uses words like a tin-opener. We are the tin.
I think people deceive themselves about themselves, particularly as they get older.
I was the place where you anchored. I was the deep water where you could be weightless. I was the surface where you saw your own reflection. You scooped me up in your hands.
You never give away your heart; you lend it from time to time. If it were not so, how could we take it back without asking?
Very often history is a means of denying the past.
I didn’t mind being unpopular at school, because everyone else was a heathen.
My friends and the people who are close to me know what I am. And that is enough.
I’ve never been tempted by God but I like his trappings.
I like to look at how people work together when they are put into stressful situations, when life stops being cozy.
Myths hook and bind the mind because at the same time they set the mind free: they explain the universe while allowing the universe to go on being unexplained; and we seem to need this even now, in our twentieth-century grandeur.
I think it would be very foolish not to take the irrational seriously.
You cannot disown what is yours. Flung out, there is always the return, the reckoning, the revenge, perhaps the reconciliation. There is always the return.
Any measurement must take into account the position of the observer. There is no such thing as measurement absolute, there is only measurement relative.
When I look at my life I realise that the mistakes I have made, the things I really regret, were not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.
She was a monster, but she was my monster.
What should I do about the wild and the tame? The wild heart that wants to be free, and the tame heart that wants to come home.
How many of us want any of us to see us as we really are?
If I let them take away my demons, I’ll have to give up what I’ve found.
What you eat is the most political thing you do every day.
Don’t lie. You know you like to view but not to buy. I have found that I am not a space where people want to live, at least not without decorating first. And that is the stubbornness in me: I do not want to be someone’s little home.