OMG this book was ABSOLUTELY AMAZING.
Made me think so much about life, regrets, etc. I think we all need to read this book right now especially, damn. And I wish I could enter a Midnight Library of my own…
Notable lines (there are so many):
“’Between life and death there is a library . . . and within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be different if you made other choices . . . Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?’”
“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 streets and suburbs, but the good stuff makes it worthwhile.”
“She stepped outside, wondering whether a life could really be judged from just a few minutes after midnight on a Tuesday. Or maybe that was all you needed.”
“This was the life she had been in mourning for. This was the life she had beaten herself up for not living. This was the timeline she thought she had regretted not existing in.”
“’So, you see? Sometimes regrets aren’t based on fact at all. Sometimes regrets are just . . . a load of bullshit.’”
“Maybe even the most seemingly perfectly intense or worthwhile lives ultimately felt the same. Acres of disappointment and monotony and hurts and rivalries but with flashes of wonder and beauty. Maybe that was the only meaning that mattered.”
“She might not have felt everything she had felt in those lives, but she had the capability .. . but she was still in some way all those people. They were all her. She could have been all those amazing things, and that wasn’t depressing, as she had once thought. Not at all. It was inspiring. Because now she saw the kinds of things she could do when she put herself to work. And that, actually, the life she had been living had its own logic to it.”
“’Life begins,’ Sartre once wrote, ‘on the other side of despair.’”
“It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living. Easy to wish we’d developed other talents, said yes to different offers . . . we can’t tell if any of those other versions would have been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.”