"That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth."
— Tim O'Brien

"It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how."
— Ann Patchett (Bel Canto)

"How terribly sad it was that people are made in such a way that they get used to something as extraordinary as living."
— Jostein Gaarder (The Solitaire Mystery)

"Why can't reason give greater answers? Why can we throw a question further than we can pull in an answer? Why such a vast net if there's so little fish to catch?"
— Yann Martel (Life of Pi)

"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here."
— Richard Dawkins