The Midnight Library

‘Antarctica is the driest continent on Earth. Technically, it’s a desert.’

It was a familiar feeling. This feeling of being incomplete in just about every sense. An unfinished jigsaw of a human. Incomplete living and incomplete dying.

‘Every life contains many millions of decisions. Some big, some small. But every time one decision is taken over another, the outcomes differ. An irreversible variation occurs, which in turn leads to further variations. These books are portals to all the lives you could be living.’

Deep down, she was scared of becoming her mother. She didn’t want to replicate her parents’ marriage.

Bertrand Russell wrote that ‘To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three-parts dead’.

This library is called the Midnight Library, because every new life on offer here begins now. And now is midnight. It begins now. All these futures. That’s what is here. That’s what your books represent.

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.

At university she had done an essay drily titled ‘The Principles of Hobbesian Memory and Imagination’. Thomas Hobbes had viewed memory and imagination as pretty much the same thing, and since discovering that she had never entirely trusted her memories.

‘Want,’ she told her, in a measured tone, ‘is an interesting word. It means lack. Sometimes if we fill that lack with something else the original want disappears entirely. Maybe you have a lack problem rather than a want problem. Maybe there is a life that you really want to live.’

He loved you as much as you loved him, and maybe he didn’t want you to see him die. You see, cats know. They understand when their time is up. He went outside because he was going to die, and he knew it.’

You could have just told me I wasn’t a bad cat owner. Why didn’t you?’ ‘Because, Nora, sometimes the only way to learn is to live.’

It is a library of possibility. And death is the opposite of possibility.

Most gossip is envy in disguise.

‘Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.’

doing one thing differently is very often the same as doing everything differently.

‘I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.’

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.

Robin Dunbar at Oxford University, who had discovered that human beings were wired to know only a hundred and fifty people, as that was the average size of hunter-gatherer communities.

The quiet made her realise how much noise there was elsewhere in the world.

In the face of death, life seemed more attractive,

To be part of nature was to be part of the will to live.

The life of a human, according to the Scottish philosopher David Hume, was of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster.

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

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.

you will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life,’

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.’

‘Look at that chessboard we put back in place,’ said Mrs Elm, softly. ‘Look at how ordered and safe and peaceful it looks now, before a game starts. It’s a beautiful thing. But it is boring. It is dead. And yet the moment you make a move on that board, things change. Things begin to get more chaotic. And that chaos builds with every single move you make.’

‘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.

In chess, as in life, possibility is the basis of everything. Every hope, every dream, every regret, every moment of living.’

‘Compassion is the basis of morality,’ the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer

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.

‘You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it.’

‘We only know what we perceive. Everything we experience is ultimately just our perception of it. “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”’

You could eat in the finest restaurants, you could partake in every sensual pleasure, you could sing on stage in São Paulo to twenty thousand people, you could soak up whole thunderstorms of applause, you could travel to the ends of the Earth, you could be followed by millions on the internet, you could win Olympic medals, but this was all meaningless without love.

Every life contains many millions of decisions. Some big, some small. But every time one decision is taken over another, the outcomes differ. An irreversible variation occurs, which in turn leads to further variations . . .

Want is an interesting word. It means lack.

The sky grows dark The black over blue Yet the stars still dare To shine for you

‘Life begins,’ Sartre once wrote, ‘on the other side of despair.’

But it is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy.

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.

life sometimes simply gave you a whole new perspective by waiting around long enough for you to see it.

the place you wanted to escape to is the exact same place you escaped from.

The paradox of volcanoes was that they were symbols of destruction but also life. Once the lava slows and cools, it solidifies and then breaks down over time to become soil – rich, fertile soil.