A lot of us read to become experts in our respective fields or to challenge our brains. Other times we read to escape from the morass of everyday life. Sometimes, for whatever reason, we come across inspiring books in our leisure reading. Here I have compiled a list of my top 30 most inspiring books, with a quote from each to make you ache for more. A lot are about love, about destiny, or about finding your place in the world.
1. The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho
There are a million good quotes in this book, but this one suffices: ““This is what we call love. When you are loved, you can do anything in creation. When you are loved, there’s no need at all to understand what’s happening, because everything happens within you.”
2. The Brief, Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
“That’s life for you. All the happiness you gather to yourself, it will sweep away like it’s nothing. If you ask me I don’t think there are any such things as curses. I think there is only life. That’s enough.”
3. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby
“There comes a time when the heaping up of calamities brings on uncontrollable nervous laughter—when, after a final blow from fate, we decide to treat it all as a joke.”
4. Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
My favorite quote is: “If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it walls, and we will furnish it with soft, red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweller’s felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn’t exist, and I have tried everything that does.”
5. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by David Eggers
“We have advantages. We have a cushion to fall back on. This is abundance. A luxury of place and time. Something rare and wonderful. It’s almost historically unprecedented. We must do extraordinary things. We have to. It would be absurd not to.”
6. 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
“Wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.”
7. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
“I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.”
8. The Life of Pi by Yann Martel
“To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.”
9. One Flew Over the Kuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
“He knows that you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy.”
10. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie
“She rested her head against his and felt, for the first time, what she would often feel with him: a self-affection. He made her like herself.”
11. Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palanhiuk
“Find out what you’re afraid of and go live there.”
12. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
“Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.”
13. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
“With the breakdown of the medieval system, the gods of chaos, lunacy, and bad taste gained ascendancy.”
14. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig
“We’re in such a hurry most of the time we never get much chance to talk. The result is a kind of endless day-to-day shallowness, a monotony that leaves a person wondering years later where all the time went and sorry that it’s all gone. ”
15. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
“It is just an illusion here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone, it is gone forever.”
16. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
“A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.”
17. The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz
“The days hardened with cold and boredom like last year’s loaves of bread. One began to cut them with blunt knives without appetite, with a lazy indifference.”
18. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
“The only relationship that can make both partners happy is one in which sentimentality has no place and neither partner makes any claim on the life and freedom of the other.”
19. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
“It doesn’t make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who’s dead.”
20. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
“Stuff your eyes with wonder, he said, live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.”
21. The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”
22. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
“I was within and without. Simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”
23. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
“Among other things, you’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You’re by no means alone on that score, you’ll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now.
24. The Curious Incident of the Dog in Night-Time by Mark Haddon
“I think people believe in heaven because they don’t like the idea of dying, because they want to carry on living and they don’t like the idea that other people will move into their house and put their things into the rubbish.”
25. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
“As happens sometimes, a moment settled and hovered and remained for much more than a moment. And sound stopped and movement stopped for much, much more than a moment.”
26. Hell’s Angels by Hunter S. Thompson
“There is not much mental distance between a feeling of having been screwed and the ethic of total retaliation, or at least the kind of random revenge that comes with outraging the public decency.”
27. The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley
“Hence I have no mercy or compassion in me for a society that will crush people, and then penalize them for not being able to stand up under the weight.”
28. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglass Adams
“He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.”
29. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
“We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all.”
30. The Stranger by Albert Camus
“I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world.”
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Featured photo credit: Elena Del Palacio via flickr.com
