Quotes From “The Midnight Library” by Matt Haig

I thought of doing a book review and just moving on with it but one, I’m not so sure I’ll do great at giving the kind of review that this book deserves and two, it feels wrong not to share the things that I was able to learn from this book because I feel like it could help someone or change someone’s mindset just like it did for me.

Summary

This book is about a woman, Nora Seed. She’s depressed and in a way, suicidal. Nothing seems to be going right in her life. Her parents are dead, she’s not on good terms with her brother and his friend because she dropped out of the band just when they were about to have their big break. Her boss just laid her off. Her best friend is in another city and they’re slowly falling off. She called off her wedding to the man of her dreams, two days before the Dday. Someone had knocked on her door that evening to tell her that he found her car dead by the sidewalk. She felt like a terrible cat mom. The cat was all she had and now he’s gone. She had no reason to live anymore so she decided she wanted to die.

She popped the pills and expected to find herself in eternal slumber but instead, she’s in a library. The librarian happened to be her high school librarian, Miss Elms, one of the few people who showed kindness to her throughout her lifetime. Miss Elms told her that every book in that library was a life that Nora was living. A life where she had made a single decision that had resulted to a change in the trajectory of her life.

Nora had the opportunity to choose a different life for herself and if she was content in that life, she could remain there but if she was disappointed, she would be back at the library.

Nora tried so many lives to find the perfect one. One where she remained in the band with her brother and his friend, one where she actually got married to the man of her dreams, another one where she never gave up swimming and became an Olympic champion, one where she was an anthologist, one where she had travelled with her best friend and so many others, but there’s no such thing as the perfect life.

{I’ll leave the ending out for you to guess or pick up the book as well if you’re very curious. Believe me, it’s worth it}

Remarkable Quotes From The Book

The only way to LEARN is to LIVE

The things is, 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.

Success is a delusion

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to life the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. — Thoreau, Walden

Humans never see the second hand of a clock mid-tick because the mind can’t see what it can’t handle.

You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life — Camus

The human brain 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 things called “Tree” — Gestalt Psychology

To be human was to continually dumb the world down into an understandable story that keeps things simple.

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.

There is no way of living that can immunize you against sadness. Sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness. You can’t have one without the other.

Life begins on the other side of despair — Saitre

Rating

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

This book was recommended by one of my biggest idols, Kim Namjoon. I got really motivated to read it when I saw an Army mum on Tiktok talk about how the book had helped her and her daughter get through an incident that could’ve been very traumatizing to them and she was very grateful to Namjoon for recommending it.

It taught me to appreciate myself, with all my imperfections. To practice the spirit of gratefulness, no matter how frustrated or tired I get with my present situation and circumstance. To let go of constant regrets for the things I did or did not do because there’s no way to know if those choices would’ve been the worst or the best. To live in the present.

There is no perfect life than the one I am living right now. Everything I have/am now is as a result of the choice I did and did not make. The people I know, the friends I have, this blog, the course I’m studying, everything was meant to be.

I’m living my best life.

Have you read The Midnight Library? What book has made the biggest impact in your life?