The Inferno - Dante Alighieri (trans. John Ciardi)

"Your soul is sunken in that cowardice/that bears down many men, turning their course/and resolution by imagined perils,/as his own shadow turns the frightened horse." (Canto II, p. 25)

"I AM THE WAY INTO THE CITY OF WOE.
I AM THE WAY TO A FORSAKEN PEOPLE.
I AM THE WAY INTO ETERNAL SORRY.
SACRED JUSTICE MOVED MY ARCHITECT.
I WAS RAISED HERE BY DIVINE OMNIPOTENCE,
PRIMORDIAL LOVE AND ULTIMATE INTELLECT." (Canto III, p. 30)

"'The double grief of a lost bliss/is to recall its happy hour in pain.'" (Canto V, p. 50)

"'Sullen were we in the air made sweet by the Sun;/in the glory of his shining our hearts poured/a bitter smoke...'" (Canto VII, p. 64)

"'O sun which clears all mists from troubled sight,/such joy attends your rising that I feel/as grateful to the dark as to the light." (Canto XI, p. 92)

"Those three sad spirits looked at one another/like men who hear the truth and understand." (Canto XVI, p. 129)

"'The man who lies asleep/will never waken fame, and his desire/and all his life drift past him like a dream,/and the traces of his memory fade from time/like smoke in air, or ripples on a stream." (Canto XXIV, p. 190)

"A man prepared is a man hurt by delay." (Canto XXVIII, p. 221)

Run - Ann Patchett

"'I said it then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.. '" (p. 130) quoting speech by Eugene V. Debs

"In suggesting that there may be nothing ahead of them, he in no way meant to diminish the future; instead, Father Sullivan hoped to elevate the present to a state of the divine. ... How wrongheaded it seemed now to think that the thrill of heartbeat and breath were just a stepping stone to something greater. What could be greater than the armchair, the window, the snow? Life itself had been holy." (p.131)

"He didn't think the whole story could possibly take more than ten minutes start to finish, and yet to live it, to actually be a part of its playing out, was an excruciating investment of time." (p. 255)

Life of Pi - Yann Martel

"The reason death sticks so closely to life isn't biological necessity - it's envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can." (p. 6)

"I have nothing to say of my working life, only that a tie is a noose, and inverted though it is, it will hang a man nonetheless if he's not careful." (p. 6)

"If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the cross 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation." (p. 28)

"Whatever the reason for wanting to escape, sane or insane, zoo detractors should realize that animals don't escape to somewhere but from something." (p. 41)

"Blue, green, red, gold and violet flickered and shimmered neon-like on its surface as it struggled. I felt I was beating a rainbow to death." (p. 185)

"I did not count the days or the weeks or the months. Time is an illusion that only makes us pant. I survived because I forgot even the very notion of time." (p. 192)

"What a terrible thing it is to botch a farewell. ... It's important in life to conclude things properly. Only then can you let go. Otherwise you are left with words you should have said but never did, and your heart is heavy with remorse." (p. 285)

"'If you stumble at mere believability, what are you living for? Isn't love hard to believe? ... Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer.'" (p. 297)

"'Tigers exist, lifeboats exists, oceans exist. Because the three have never come together in your narrow, limited experience, you refuse to believe that they might. Yet the plain fact is that the Tsimtsum brought them together and then sank.'" (p. 299)

"You want a story that won't surprise you. That will confirm what you already know. That won't make you see any higher or further or differently. You want a flat story. An immobile story. You want dry, yeastless factuality." (p. 302)

Anna Karenina - Tolstoy

"He could not have been mistaken. There were no other eyes in the world like those. There was no other being in the world capable of concentrating for him all the light and meaning of life. It was she. It was Kitty. He realized that she was driving to Yergushovo from the railway station. And all that had troubled Levin during that sleepless night, all the decisions he had taken, all of it suddenly vanished. He recalled with disgust his dreams of marrying a peasant woman. There, in that carriage quickly moving away and bearing to the other side of the road, was the only possibility of resolving the riddle of his life that had been weighing on him so painfully of late."
(p. 277)

"She loved him for himself and for his love of her. To possess him fully was a constant joy for her. His nearness was always pleasing to her. All the traits of his character, which she was coming to know more and more, were inexpressibly dear to her. ... Her admiration for him often frightened her: she sought and failed to find anything not beautiful in him. She did not dare show him her awareness of her own nullity before him. It seemed to her that if he knew it, he would stop loving her sooner; and she feared nothing so much now, though she had no reason for it, as losing his love." (p. 464)

"What he felt for this small being was not at all what he expected. There was nothing happy or joyful in this feeling; on the contrary, there was a new tormenting fear. There was an awareness of a new region of vulnerability. And this awareness was so tormenting at first, the fear lest this helpless being should suffer was so strong, that because of it he scarcely noticed the strange feeling of senseless joy and even pride he had experienced when the baby sneezed." (p. 719)

"But he needed only to go and stay for a while in Petersburg, in the circle to which he belonged, where people lived - precisely lived, and did not vegetate as in Moscow - and immediately all these thoughts vanished and melted away like wax before the face of fire. ...
Children? In Petersburg children did not hinder their father's life. Children were brought up in institutions, and there existed nothing like that wild idea spreading about Moscow ... that children should get all the luxuries of life and parents nothing but toil and care. Here they understood that a man is obliged to live for himself, as an educated person ought to live." (p. 729)

"Moreover, he felt vaguely that what he called his convictions were not only ignorance but were a way of thinking that made the knowledge he needed impossible.
...
The question for him consisted in the following: 'If I do not accept the answers that Christianity gives to the questions of my life, then which answers do I accept?' And nowhere in the whole arsenal of his convictions was he able to find, not only any answers, but anything resembling an answer.
He was in the position of a man looking for food in a toymaker's or a gunsmith's shop.
Involuntarily, unconsciously, he now sought in every book, in every conversation, in every person, a connection with these questions and their resolution.
What amazed and upset him most of all was that the majority of people his age and circle, who had replaced their former beliefs, as he had, with the same new beliefs as he had, did not see anything wrong with it and were perfectly calm and content. So that, besides the main question, Levin was tormented by other questions: Are these people sincere? Are they not pretending? Or do they not understand somehow differently, more clearly, than he the answers science gives to the questions that concerned him?" (p. 786)

"He felt something new in his soul and delightedly probed this new thing, not yet knowing what it was.
'To live not for one's own needs but for God. For what God? For God. And could anything more meaningless be said than what he said? He said one should not live for one's needs - that is, one should not live for what we understand, for what we're drawn to, for what we want - but for something incomprehensible, for God, whom no one can either comprehend or define.'" (p. 795)