The Midnight Library: The No.1 Sunday Times bestseller and worldwide phenomenon

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.

Sometimes regrets aren’t based on fact at all. Sometimes regrets are just . . .’ She searched for the appropriate term and found it. ‘A load of bullshit.’

Nora had read about multiverses and knew a bit about Gestalt psychology.

the prison wasn’t the place, but the perspective.

There is no rejection, there is only redirection.

There was an invisible baton of failure her mother had passed down, and Nora had held it for a long time.

We don’t have to play every game to know what winning feels like.

more precisely: she imagined she was grateful, because he was lovely, and there were so many moments of joy and laughter and love.

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.

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