“Between life and death there is a library, and within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices… Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?” — Matt Haig

This how Matt Haig opens his beautiful novel, The Midnight Library.

It’s a story about a young woman named Nora who struggles to find a way out of depression. One day, she decides to swallow a bunch of pills to, once and for all, put her miserable life to an end. However, instead of dying immediately, she ends up in a special kind of library; a place that allows her to travel in time and relive her life a hundred times over, choosing to do things differently each time.

In her continuous search for a life worth living, she eventually realizes that, no matter what kind of life she wants to lead or what decisions she makes along the way, life’s hurt and pain and disappointment and fear will always be a part of it.

But so will joy and beauty and wonder and love...

“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.” — Matt Haig

Just as Nora rans out of her options and is about to leave this world forever, it suddenly strikes her: she wants to live, after all!

Haig wrote this touching story after having struggled with depression and anxiety himself for many years, which is probably why the words he uses really hit home.

I would strongly recommend this book to anyone for has been on either side: those who have experienced being stuck in a dark tunnel themselves as well as those who know somebody else who has.

Other beautiful quotes by Matt Haig

Here are a few other memorable lines from The Midnight Library that Iove:

On acceptance

"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. To be the world, witnessing itself."

On uncertainty

“It’s hard to predict, isn’t it? — The things that will make us happy.”

On being stuck

"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."

On life’s beauty

"Of course, we can't visit every place or meet every person or do every job, yet most of what we'd feel in any life is still available. We don't have to play every game to know what winning feels like. 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. We are as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum."

On making choices

"“I think it’s easy to imagine there are easier paths,” she said, realising something for the first time. “But maybe there are no easy paths. They are just paths.”"

On love

"Why want another universe if this one has dogs?"

Kindly,

Neva