Doing Things They Didn't Like Doing

　　'I don't know why more people don't do this,' I said, striking up a conversation.

　　'Do what?'

　　'You know, get drunk. Sit on a park bench. It seems like a good way to solve problems.'

　　'Are you taking the piss, fella?'

　　'No. I like it. And you obviously like it or you wouldn't be doing it.'

　　of course, this as a little bit disingenuous of me. Humans were always doing things they didn't like doing. In fact, to my best estimate, at any one time only point three percent of humans were actively doing something they liked doing, and even when they did so, they felt an intense amount of guilt about it and were fervently promising themselves they'd be back doing something horrendously unpleasant shortly.

The Humans, P241
Matt Haig
ISBN 978-0-85786-876-3

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Sound of A Truth Hitting A Lie

　　'Are we going to have sex?'

　　She laughed some more. Laughter, I realised, was the reverberating sound of a truth hitting a lie. Humans existed inside their own delusions and laughing was a way out - the only possible bridge they had between each other. That, and love. ... ...

The Humans, P232
Matt Haig
ISBN 978-0-85786-876-3

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It Could Only be Caught by Letting Go

　　'I love you,' she said.

　　And I knew the point of love right then.

　　The point of love was to help you survive.

　　The point was also to forget meaning. To stop looking and start living. The meaning was to hold the hand of someone you cared about and live inside the present. Past and future were myths. The past was just the present that had died and the future would never exist anyway, because by the time we got to it the future would have turned into the present. The present was all there was. The ever-moving, ever-changing present. And the present was fickle. It could only be caught by letting go.

　　So I let go.

　　I let go of everything in the universe.

　　Everything except her hand.

The Humans, P221-222
Matt Haig
ISBN 978-0-85786-876-3

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The Luck That Brought That Person There

　　You see, when you looked at a human's face, you had to comprehend the luck that brought that person there. Isobel Martin has a total of 150,000 generations before her, and that only includes the humans. That was 150,000 increasingly unlikely copulations resulting in increasingly unlikely children. That was a one in quadrillion chance multiplied bu another quadrillion for every generation.

　　Or around twenty thousand times more than the number of the atoms in the universe. But even that was only the start of it, because humans had only been around for three million Earth years, certainly a very short time compared to the three and a half billion years since life first appeared on this planet.

　　Therefore, mathematically, rounding things up, there was no chance at all that Isobel Martin could have existed. A zero in ten-to-the-power-of-forever chance. And yet there she was, in front of me, and I was quite taken aback by it all; I really was. Suddenly it made me realise why religion was such a big thing around here. Because, yes, sure, God could not exist. But then neither could humans. So, if they believed in themselves - the logic must go - why not believe in something that was only a fraction more unlikely?

The Humans, P207
Matt Haig
ISBN 978-0-85786-876-3

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Tested Fermentation

　　I hadn't tried wine before so I said yes, as it really did seem to be very revered substance. It was a mild night so Isobel poured me a glass and we sat outside in the garden. Newton decided to stay indoors. I looked at the transparent yellow fluid in the glass. I tasted it and tasted fermentation. In other words I tasted life on Earth. For everything that lives here ferments, ages, becomes diseased. But as things made their decline from ripeness they could taste wonderful, I realised.

The Humans, P202
Matt Haig
ISBN 978-0-85786-876-3

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They Only Had Saturdays

　　Belonging as I did to a species which had only ever really known one day, there was initially something quite exciting about having any kind of rhythm at all. But now I was stuck here for good I began to resent humans lack of imagination. I believed they should have tried a little more variety into proceedings. I mean, this was the species whose main excuse for not doing something was 'if only I had more time'. Perfectly valid until you realised they did have more time. Not eternity, granted, but they had tomorrow. And the day after tomorrow. And the day after the day after tomorrow. In fact I would have had to write 'the day after' thirty thousand times before a final 'tomorrow' in order to illustrate the amount of time on a human hands.

　　The problem lying behind the lack of human fulfillment was a shortage not just of time but imagination. They found a day that worked for them and then stuck to it, and repeat it, at least between Monday and Friday. Even if it didn't work for them - as usually the case - they stuck to it anyway. Then they'd alter things a bit and do something a little bit more fun on Saturday and Sunday.

　　One initial proposal I wanted to put to them was to swap things over. For instance, have five fun days and two not-fun days. That way - call me a mathematical genius - they would have more fun. But as things stood, there weren't even two fun days. They only had Saturdays, because Mondays were a little bit too close to Sundays for Sunday's liking, as if Monday were a collapsed star in the week's solar system, with an excessive gravitational pull. In other words one seventh of human days worked quite well. The other six weren't very good, and five of those were roughly the same say stuck on repeat.

　　... ...

The Humans, P197-198
Matt Haig
ISBN 978-0-85786-876-3

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Everything was Impossible

　　You are not dead. Gulliver, you are not dead.

　　I kept at it, because I knew what life was, I understood its nature, its character, it stubborn insistence.

　　Life, especially human life, was an act of defiance. It was never meant to be, and yet it existed in an incredible number of places across a near-infinite amount of solar systems.

　　There was no such thing as impossible. I knew that, because I also knew that everything was impossible, and so the only possibilities in life were impossibilities.

The Humans, P172
Matt Haig
ISBN 978-0-85786-876-3

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It Made No Sense

　　And hope was often irrational. It made no sense. If it had made sense it would have been called, well, sense. The other thing about hope was that it took effort, and I had never been used to effort. At home, nothing had been an effort. That was the whole point of home, the comfort of a perfectly effortless existence. Yet there I was. Hoping. Not that I was standing there, passively, just wishing him better from a distance. Of course not. I placed my hand - my gift hand - to his heart, and I began to work.

The Humans, P171
Matt Haig
ISBN 978-0-85786-876-3

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The Possibility of Pain is Where Love Stems From

　　'Listen,' I found myself saying, 'he is going to have to find his own way, to make his own mistakes.'

　　'We need to find out who did that to him, Andrew. That's what we need to do. People can't just go around inflicting violence on human beings like that. They just can't do that. What ethical code do you live by where you can sound so indifferent about it?'

　　What could I say? 'I'm sorry. I'm not indifferent. I care for him, of course I do.' And the terrifying thing, the absolutely awful fact I had to face, was that I was right. I did care. The warning had failed, you see. Indeed, it had had the opposite effect.

　　That's what starts to happen, when you know it is possible for you to feel pain you have no control over. You become vulnerable. Because the possibility of pain is where love stems from. And that, for me, was very bad news indeed.

The Humans, P165
Matt Haig
ISBN 978-0-85786-876-3

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It Warms Your Brain

　　I was not exactly difficult to make human students a mathematics laugh. Indeed, I had never met a sub-category of life form so desperate to laugh - but still, it felt good. For a few brief moments, it even felt slightly more than good.

　　I felt warmth and, I don't know, a kind of forgiveness or acceptance from these students.

　　'But listen,' I said, 'don't worry. Those aliens up there - they don't know what they are missing.'

　　Applause. (When humans really like something they clap their hands together. It makes no sense. But when they do it on behalf of you it warms your brain.)

The Humans, P157-158
Matt Haig
ISBN 978-0-85786-876-3

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Humans Don't Actually Like to Win

　　Luckily for Professor Andrew Martin, the football team he supported was Cambridge United, one of those which successfully avoided the perils and existential trauma of victory. To support Cambridge United, I discovered, was to support the idea of failure. To watch a team's feet consistently avoid the spherical Earth-symbol seemed to frustrate their supporters greatly, but they obviously wouldn't have it any other way. The truth is, you see, however much they beg to disagree, humans don't actually like to win. Or rather, they like winning for ten seconds but if they keep on winning they end up actually having to think about other things, like life and death. The only thing humans like less than winning is losing, but at least something can be done about that. With absolute winning, there is nothing to be done. They just have to deal with it.

The Humans, P142-143
Matt Haig
ISBN 978-0-85786-876-3

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Try not to Understand So Much, and Accept Some More

　　'We've lost him,' she said. It took me moment to realise she was talking about Gulliver.

　　'Well,' I said, 'maybe we just have to accept him as he is, even if he's different to what we've known.'

　　'I just don't understand him. You know, he's our son. And we've known him for sixteen years. And yet, I feel like I don't know him at all.'

　　'Well, maybe we should try not to understand so much, and accept some more.'

The Humans, P127
Matt Haig
ISBN 978-0-85786-876-3

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Make It Even Better

It's BIG! It's STRONG! It's AWESOMERIFIC!

But Rex wrecks it anyway.

EVERYONE is upset.

Even Rex.


... ...


So they all help build something new.

And it turns out that Rex is a big help.

He doesn't wreck anything.

Not even a little.


It looks FANTASTIC!

Everyone is happy.

Even Rex.

Mostly.


There is just one more thing to do to
make it even better ...


Rex Wrecks It!
Ben Clanton
ISBN 978-0-07636-6501-2

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The Language of Frowns

　　'Oh yes,' I said, faking it. 'Of course. Maggie.'

　　Then she raised her eyebrows at me. It meant something, clearly, but I had no idea what. It was frustrating. You see, the Language of Words was only one of the human languages. There were many others, as I pointed out. The Language of Sighs, the Language of Silent Moments and, most significantly, the Language of Frowns.

The Humans, P113
Matt Haig
ISBN 978-0-85786-876-3

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The Mental and the Physical

　　'You see, as you no doubt know, humans are still at the point in their development where they see a strong difference between the mental and the physical within the same body. They have mental hospitals and body hospitals, as if one doesn't directly affect the other. And so, if they can't accept that a mind is directly responsible for the body of the same person, they are hardly likely to understand how a mind - abeit not a human one - can affect the body of someone else. ... ...

The Humans, P108
Matt Haig
ISBN 978-0-85786-876-3

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