"Happiness is the lucky pane of glass you carry in your head. It takes all your cunning just to hang on to it, and once it's smashed you have to move into a different sort of life."
— Carol Shields (Unless: A Novel)

"Without friends, no one would want to live, even if he had all other goods."
— Aristotle

"But this is wrong, nobody dies from a lack of sex. It's a lack of love we die from. There's nobody here I can love, all the people I could love are dead or elsewhere. Who knows where they are or what their names are now? They might as well be nowhere, as I am for them. I too am a missing person."
— Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale)

"A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us."
— J.M. Coetzee (Summertime: Scenes from a provincial life III)

"The fields were fruitful, and starving men moved on the roads."
— John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath)

"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them."
— Mark Twain

"I guess there are never enough books."
— John Steinbeck

"When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called a Religion."
— Robert M. Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values)