# The Midnight Library  ## Metadata - Author: [[Matt Haig]] - Full Title: The Midnight Library - Category: #books ## Highlights - 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k0txsmfwzjb3n4ksvgyza9y7)) - She’d been the fastest fourteen-year-old girl in the country at breaststroke and second-fastest at freestyle. She remembered standing on a podium at the National Swimming Championships. ‘So, what happened?’ She gave the short version. ‘It was a lot of pressure.’ ‘Pressure makes us, though. You start off as coal and the pressure makes you a diamond.’ ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k0ty9tdb7b3rr4ynwz5tmg3r)) - ‘I don’t think your problem was stage fright. Or wedding fright. I think your problem was *life fright*.’ This hurt. The words took the air out of her. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k0tyvda6g7em12ad58y1caqs)) - ‘Go confidently in the direction of your dreams,’ Thoreau had said. ‘Live the life you’ve imagined.’ ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k0tyzpdhc46z2fybd4e2xmdz)) - Thoreau had been her favourite philosopher to study. But who seriously goes confidently in the direction of their dreams? Well, apart from Thoreau. He’d gone and lived in the woods, with no contact from the outside world, to just sit there and write and chop wood and fish. But life was probably simpler two centuries ago in Concord, Massachusetts, than modern life in Bedford, Bedfordshire. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k0tyzk3x1ew5fznf9ygx5q4n)) - ‘Cheer up, love, it might never happen,’ someone said. *Nothing ever did,* she thought to herself. *That was the whole problem*. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k0tz0tn5xv0q3a0rmg2wfvrp)) - Nora went through her social media. No messages, no comments, no new followers, no friend requests. She was antimatter, with added self-pity. She went on Instagram and saw everyone had worked out how to live, except her. She posted a rambling update on Facebook, which she didn’t even really use any more. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k0tz51keaftbvm4vnywtzdq6)) - But her life was a cacophony of nonsense. A piece that could have gone in wonderful directions, but now went nowhere at all. Time slipped by. She stared into space. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k0tz911fjjqjegg64c6f1jpz)) - After the wine a realisation hit her with total clarity. She wasn’t made for this life. Every move had been a mistake, every decision a disaster, every day a retreat from who she’d imagined she’d be. Swimmer. Musician. Philosopher. Spouse. Traveller. *Glaciologist*. Happy. Loved. Nothing. She couldn’t even manage ‘cat owner’. Or ‘one-hour-a-week piano tutor’. Or ‘human capable of conversation’. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k0tz9pazfqz1htf3rv1b3sa9)) - *I had all the chances to make something of my life, and I blew every one of them. Through my own carelessness and misfortune, the world has retreated from me, and so now it makes perfect sense that I should retreat from the world*. *If I felt it was possible to stay, I would. But I don’t. And so I can’t. I make life worse for people*. *I have nothing to give. I’m sorry*. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k0tzh3fa6t6rk3frbv9jbjqm)) - The regrets which were on permanent repeat in her mind. *I haven’t become an Olympic swimmer. I haven’t become a glaciologist. I haven’t become Dan’s wife. I haven’t become a mother. I haven’t become the lead singer of The Labyrinths. I haven’t managed to become a truly good or truly happy person. I haven’t managed to look after Voltaire*. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k0tzr1dgg9fk1jzcfvc7d91m)) - 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k0tzzpt504pcv8gdqbyqb13r)) - A person was like a city. You couldn’t let a few less desirable parts put you off the whole. There may be bits you don’t like, a few dodgy side streets and suburbs, but the good stuff makes it worthwhile. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k0v0fy1gvkj2gtwf547emt0v)) ## New highlights added July 24, 2025 at 5:00 PM - sometimes the only way to learn is to *live*.’ ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k0xgd0spb5azv8ax8ca48z3v)) - you can choose choices but not outcomes. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k0xm64c5y2e2hc8e4hgdj48q)) - Weirdly, she felt just as sad for the version of her who had never fallen in love with the simple beauty of Thoreau’s *Walden*, or the stoical Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, as she had felt sympathy for the version of her who never fulfilled her Olympic potential. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k0xn4tn0vk4nav6f268hp2ra)) - A life without music. A life without reading the books she had loved. But also: a life where she got on with her brother. A life where she hadn’t had to let him down. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k0xn93t6m7wt1gy6jz18p7rz)) - Maybe that’s what all lives were, though. Maybe even the most seemingly perfectly intense or worthwhile lives ultimately felt the same. Acres of disappointment and monotony and hurts and rivalries but with flashes of wonder and beauty. Maybe that was the only meaning that mattered ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k0xpd7qxwg1hsz6k2frb0jx7)) - She imagined, now, what it would be like to accept herself completely. Every mistake she had ever made. Every mark on her body. Every dream she hadn’t reached or pain she had felt. Every lust or longing she had suppressed. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k0xpk05cm44mrbwevrvykb8k)) - She imagined seeing herself as just another brilliant freak of nature. Just another sentient animal, trying their best. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k0xpkdjtys1ybm6zsmzac9hn)) - ‘Exactly. I am here but I also know I am not here. I am also lying in a hospital in Paris, having an aneurysm. And I am also skydiving in Arizona. And travelling around southern India. And tasting wine in Lyon, and lying on a yacht off the Côte d’Azur.’ ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k0xpr1gpcmkybmbg8thdvvtj)) - Nora had read about multiverses and knew a bit about Gestalt psychology. About how human brains take complex information about the world and simplify it, so that when a human looks at a tree it translates the intricately complex mass of leaves and branches into this thing called ‘tree’. To be a human was to continually dumb the world down into an understandable story that keeps things simple. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k0xpv845ceavpt2ec4q7hckp)) - A human sees the world in three dimensions. That is a simplification. Humans are fundamentally limited, generalising creatures, living on auto-pilot, who straighten out curved streets in their minds, which explains why they get lost all the time. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k0xpw0tbd1grwxp9236jmjjw)) - ‘I have been so many things. On every continent on Earth. And yet I have never found the life for me. I am resigned to being this way for ever. There will never be a life that I truly want to live for ever. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k0xpyzz1ej82yekr6v18px6t)) - Nora found it almost impossible to believe that while in one life she was struggling to pay the rent, in another she was causing such excitement among people all over the world. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k0xqva116h4xdhvg003f2sy5)) - Nora didn’t know what to say. That little song she had written when she was nineteen years old at university in Bristol had changed the life of a person in Brazil. It was overwhelming. This, clearly, was the life she was destined for. She doubted that she would ever have to go back to the library ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k0xfzrc69m4pascx5psnqfxg)) - This was so surreal. In one life, the life he’d supposedly wanted, Dan was so bored in his marriage to Nora he was having an affair, while in *this* life he was breaking into her house because he couldn’t stand her success. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k0xga6y6dx8mh4m0b1kk44yb)) - ‘I think it is easy to imagine there are easier paths,’ she said, realising something for the first time. ‘But maybe there are no easy paths. There are just paths. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k0xgfxqpr9cbf212kghkt1m8)) - Every second of every day we are entering a new universe. And we spend so much time wishing our lives were different, comparing ourselves to other people and to other versions of ourselves, when really most lives contain degrees of good and degrees of bad.’ ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k0xggyw2b7gajhmd8s19117e)) - ‘There are patterns to life . . . Rhythms. It is so easy, while trapped in just the one life, to imagine that times of sadness or tragedy or failure or fear are a result of that particular existence. That it is a by-product of living a certain way, rather than simply *living* ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k0xgkvrr2nqxfke1e65nvspt)) - I mean, it would have made things a lot easier if we understood there was no way of living that can immunise you against sadness. And that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness. You can’t have one without the other. Of course, they come in different degrees and quantities. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k0xgmp10ynejzheb6dg71m4w)) - But there is no life where you can be in a state of sheer happiness for ever. And imagining there is just breeds more unhappiness in the life you’re in.’ ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k0xgjxgmrgs5xbqpz502bmxs)) - ‘Even these bad experiences are serving a purpose, don’t you see?’ She saw. The regrets she had been living with most of her life were wasted ones. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k0xgzmjr62rpjbq500wsaf5b)) - ‘And the thing you need to realise is this: the game is never over until it is over. It isn’t over if there is a single pawn still on the board. If one side is down to a pawn and a king, and the other side has every player, there is still a game ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k0xh1eygv6jnmtv7x8d7s76q)) - Every life she had tried so far since entering the library had really been someone else’s dream ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k0xh7kqrp753jzge75djkh6x)) - ‘At the beginning of a game, there are no variations. There is only one way to set up a board. There are nine million variations after the first six moves. And after eight moves there are two hundred and eighty-eight billion different positions. And those possibilities keep growing. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k0xhb076r2y4e13kcvhsn4kk)) - In chess, as in life, possibility is the basis of everything. Every hope, every dream, every regret, every moment of living.’ ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k0xhbfwmbkdketx6vja8hxvh)) - ‘Compassion is the basis of morality,’ the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer had written, in one of his softer moments. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k0xhe3tag89vdvpetaezvt9p)) - In one life she spent all day arguing with people she didn’t know on Twitter and ended a fair proportion of her tweets by saying ‘Do better’ while secretly realising she was telling herself to do that. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k0xj7v7gwm2m00x8mm5226dy)) - Fear was when you wandered into a cellar and worried that the door would close shut. Despair was when the door closed and locked behind you. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k0xjc5tcdd94k4pdtzakmw79)) ## New highlights added July 27, 2025 at 2:48 PM - ‘You don’t have to *understand* life. You just have to *live* it.’ ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k11a7b6zre24fmp9ans0kg00)) - She tried to make herself look as presentable as it was possible to look in the two seconds before the arrival of a man she simultaneously slept with every night and also hadn’t ever slept with. Schrödinger’s husband, so to speak. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k11c6e8hp5z3rjssk0yv1f6r)) - This seemed pretty good. Almost *annoyingly* good. A good life with a good daughter and a good man in a good house in a good town. It was an excess of good. A life where she could sit down all day reading and researching and writing about her all-time favourite philosopher. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k11cc7ywm6sd32se5eghnjr1)) - This little human being had come from her, was in some way a part of her, and if she had hidden strength then maybe Nora did too. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k11dgb9jnyp4va9kwbsa8q78)) - she felt the power of it, the terrifying power of caring deeply and being cared for deeply. Okay, her parents were still dead in this life but here there was Molly, there was Ash, there was Joe. There was a net of love to break her fall. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k11djg22bxh91frzqhnq6zq6)) - She thought of the lovely house in Cambridge she now had and couldn’t help but compare it to this shabby flat on a litter-strewn street. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k11drsv8bns9z24v3v5p1xq8)) - she didn’t want to live any other life than the one that was hers. The one that could be a messy struggle, but it was her messy struggle. A beautiful messy struggle. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k11e9y2hanw68t35cw4t944w)) - It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k11ef2b1t0be2ffqsf823281)) - Easy to wish we’d developed other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we’d worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k11eg25ex9ffhaw2kjpememd)) - It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn’t make and the work we didn’t do and the people we didn’t marry and the children we didn’t have. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k11efhk875qe6jgsq7x28xb2)) - It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k11eghat4qm9ksjq8d4h6vve)) - We don’t have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. We don’t have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies. We just have to close our eyes and savour the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k11ej2vjhsjhbbg7r3ckg816)) - Nora made a slight noise of involuntary joy at the back of her throat. She texted back. 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k11eq2wn3kr59wd8tkba3669)) - And Nora smiled as she stared at all the pieces she still had left in play, thinking about her next move. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k11f3xz2c8c2ebxmjxvz4ysz))