The Midnight Library Quotes
"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."
"Because, Nora, sometimes the only way to learn is to live."
"Everyone’s lives could have ended up an infinite number of ways. These books are portals to all the lives you could be living."
"You have as many lives as you have possibilities. There are lives where you make different choices. And those choices lead to different outcomes."
"The art of swimming – she supposed like any art – was about purity. The more focused you were on the activity, the less focused you were on everything else."
"It’s hard to predict, isn’t it? The things that will make us happy."
"It seemed unfair to Nora that Mrs Elm could read the lives without falling into them."
"Doing one thing differently is often the same as doing everything differently. Actions can’t be reversed within a lifetime, however much we try."
"The only danger is when you’re here. Between lives. If you lose the will to carry on, it will affect your root life – your original life."
"Life isn’t simply made of the things we do, but the things we don’t do too."
"Doing one thing differently is very often the same as doing everything differently."
"Success isn’t something you measure, and life isn’t a race you can win."
"If you aim to be something you are not, you will always fail."
"Embrace that you-ness. Endorse it. Love it. Work hard at it."
"The only difference is they have a clear goal in mind, and a determination to get there."
"Stamina is essential to stay focused in a life filled with distraction."
"Depressed fish stayed below the line. But give those same fish Prozac and they go above the line."
"Never underestimate the big importance of small things."
"Maybe in some lives you just float around and expect nothing else and don’t even try to change."
"Every alternative possibility happens simultaneously."
"Every moment of your life you enter a new universe."
"One thing I’ve noticed is that the other people I’ve met have all been around our age. All thirties or forties or fifties."
"Schrödinger’s life. Both dead and alive in your own mind."
"To be a human was to continually dumb the world down into an understandable story that keeps things simple."
"Humans never see the second hand of a clock mid-tick. Minds can’t see what they can’t handle."
"You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life."
"The librarian’s smile curled at its edges, like a fallen leaf."
"The only reason I am still in this life is because of you."
"You need to pick the life you’d be most happy inside. Or soon there won’t be a choice at all."
"You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it."
"It is quite a revelation to discover that the place you wanted to escape to is the exact same place you escaped from."
"The prison wasn’t the place, but the perspective."
"You don’t exist because of the library; this library exists because of you."
"It all makes sense. You have decided you want to be alive."
"It wasn’t my life. I hadn’t made it by myself."
"Don’t give up! Don’t you dare give up, Nora Seed!"
"Every life contains many millions of decisions."