“The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.”
– George Orwell, 1984 (Derin Uluc)

“Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you.”
– David Foster Wallace, This is Water (Liam Short)

“Sometimes you need a little crisis to get your adrenaline flowing and help you realize your potential.”
– Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle (Savannah Stallings)

“That man who is more than his elements knows the land that is more than its analysis. But the machine man, driving the dead tractor on land he does not know and love, understands only chemistry.”
– John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (Navin Rai)

“It’s not always necessary to be strong, but to feel strong.”
– Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild (Ryan Sprosty)

“Don’t let your thoughts run away with you, don’t start planning to bail out because you’re worried about the future and how much you can take.”
– Marcus Luttrell, Lone Survivor (Jared Osmond)

“It’s the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting.”
– Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist (Nathalie Nava)

“But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony–Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?”
– Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front (Makenna Mumford)

“Behind every trial and sorrow that He makes us shoulder, God has a reason.”
– Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns (Jordan McIntosh)

“Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”
– J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (Luisa Macias)

“He had been full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity (5.114)”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (Mina McCormick)

“I am afraid. Not of life, or death, or nothingness, but of wasting it as if I had never been.”
– Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon (Eddy Flores)

“First with the head and then with the heart, that’s how a man stays ahead from the start.”
– Bryce Courtenay, The Power of One (Annette Le)

“It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts”
– Henry David Thoreau, Walden (Jessica Lundstrom)

“It has always been my practice to cast a long paragraph in a single mould, to try it by my ear, to deposit it in my memory, but to suspend the action of the pen ’til I had given the last polish to the work.”
– Edward Gibbon, Memoirs (Paul Evans)

“The thing is – fear can’t hurt you any more than a dream.”
– William Golding, Lord of the Flies (Alex Churness)

“A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.”
– Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (Jake Larson)

“He says that words distort what a person really feels in his heart.””
– Chaim Potok, The Chosen (Noor Fahmy)

“They’re certainly entitled to think that, and they’re entitled to full respect for their opinions… but before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself.”
– Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (Emma Bose)

“I’ve been thinking about it, and that poem, that guy that wrote it, he meant you’re gold when you’re a kid, like green. When you’re a kid everything’s new, dawn. It’s just when you get used to everything that it’s day. Like the way you dig sunsets, Pony. That’s gold. Keep that way, it’s a good way to be.”
– Susan E. Hinton, The Outsiders (Kevin Amoura)

“Even in those cities which seem to enjoy the blessings of peace, and where the arts flourish, the inhabitants are devoured by envy, cares and anxieties, which are greater plagues than any experienced in a town when it is under siege.”
– Voltaire, Candide (Ryan Alvarado)

“The paradox of vengefulness is that it makes men dependent upon those who have harmed them, believing that their release from pain will come only when their tormentors suffer.”
– Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken (Isabel Busyn)

“Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to light, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us in the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels and the harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist’s arm chair and confuse his ‘Rinse the mouth—rinse the mouth’ with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to welcome us—when we think of this an infinitely more, as we are so frequently forced to  think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.”
– Virginia Woolf, “On Being Ill” (Alexa Ripa)

“All Rome thronged with incredible rejoicing to see the dead body of Alexander in Saint Peter’s, unable to satiate their eyes enough with seeing spent that serpent who in his boundless ambition and pestiferous perfidy, and with all his examples of horrible cruelty and monstrous sensuality and unheard-of avarice, selling without distinction sacred and profane things, had envenomed the entire world.”
– Francesco Guicciardini, The History of Italy (Paul Evans)