Irina Bălan's Key Ideas from The Midnight Library
by Matt Haig

His voice, she realised, didn't sound like she remembered. It sounded emptier. A bit colder. Maybe it was tiredness. Maybe it was stress. Maybe it was marriage.

Bertrand Russell wrote that 'To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three-parts dead'... But Bertrand Russell had more marriages and affairs than hot diners, so perhaps he was no on to give advice.

The thing she once loved about swimming was the disappearing. In the water, her focus had been so pure that she thought of nothing else. Any school or home worries vanished. 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. You kind of stopped being you and became the thing you were doing.

She felt like a learner driver at a busy junction, nervously waiting for a clear and safe patch of road.

Excellent outcomes are the result of 'the wise choice of many alternatives'. Aristotle?

'Librarians have knowledge. They guide you to the right books. The right worlds. They find the best places. Like soul-enhanced search engines.'

When you stay to 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. 

Never trust someone who is willingly rude to low-paid service staff.

The lonely mind in the busy city yearns for connection because it thinks that human-to-human connection is the point of everything. But amid pure nature solitude took on a different character. It became in itsled a connection. And between her and herself.

Everything humans see 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.

You can be anything you want to be. You are limited only by your imagination.

'But you will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.' Camus?

It is quite a revelation to discover that the place you wanted to escape to is the exact same place you escaped from. That the prison wasn't the place, but the perspective.

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.