A review by kristenelizabeth
How to Stop Time by Matt Haig

3.5

The book as a whole didn't do it for me, because I so badly wanted to care more about the characters and the plot but just couldn't. But I did really love some of the lines—a few of my favorite parts:

"That's the thing with time, isn't it? It's not all the same. Some days - some years - some decades - are empty. There is nothing to them. It's just flat water. And then you come across a year, or even a day, or an afternoon. And it is everything. It is the whole thing."

"The longer you live, the harder it becomes. To grab them. Each little moment as it arrives. To be living in something other than the past or the future. To be actually here. Forever, Emily Dickinson said, is composed of nows. But how do you inhabit the now you are in? How do you stop the ghosts of all the other nows from getting in?"

"Maybe that is what it takes to love someone. Finding a happy mystery you would like to unravel for ever."

"There is only the present. Just as every object on earth contains similar and interchanging atoms, so every fragment of time contains aspects of every other. In those monents that burst alive the present lasts for ever, and I know there are many more presents to live. I understand you can be free. I understand that the way you stop time is by stopping being ruled by it. I am no longer drowning in my past, or fearful of my future. How can I be? The future is you."

"This is so often the way with life. You spend so much time waiting for something – a person, a feeling, a piece of information – that you can’t quite absorb it when it is in front of you. The hole is so used to being a hole it doesn’t know how to close itself."

"I loved someone once. A woman. I loved her madly. Do you understand? We were together, in secret, for nearly twenty years. And we were told we couldn't talk about that love...because it was dangerous. It was dangerous to love," Mary said. "There comes a time when the only way to start living is to tell the truth. To be who you really are, even if it is dangerous."