“You got a life? Live it! Live the motherfuckin life!”

Shop Song Of Solomon by Toni Morrison (£9.49, Vintage) at Bookshop 

“Even in a place of sorrow, time passes. Even in a place of joy. Do not assume that either keeps life from continuing.”

Shop The Love Songs Of WEB Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (£9.99, HarperCollins) at Bookshop

“I tell her acts like these remind us that we never arrive – we never really know or possess or own a thing, but must recognise life and its material only as a great gesture forward. A perpetual hunt for that unsurmountable thing. That’s where the bliss is.” 

Shop Maps Of Our Spectacular Bodies by Maddie Mortimer (£14.99, Picador)

“After all, why would it help to be shown the mathematics of things, when instead we could simply imagine that whatever time we have is limitless.”

Shop Our Wives Under The Sea by Julia Armfield (£16.98, Picador) at Bookshop 

“When life knocks you down, roll over and look at the stars.”

Shop Philosophy Of Snoopy: A Peanuts Guide To Life by Charles M Schulz (£8.99, Canongate) at Bookshop

“Put it like that, it kind of makes us sound like plants sending out pollen, doesn’t it? When a life ends, it flies far away and fertilises new life.”

Shop Life Ceremony by Sayaka Murata (£12.99, Granta) at Bookshop

“Believe me: there’s nothing more dangerous in life than to become an indoor sitter.”

Shop Moominland Midwinter by Tove Jansson (£10.99) at Sort Of

“It’s okay to experience joy even if the world feels like it’s falling apart. 

It’s okay to experience joy even if the world is ending. 

It’s okay to allow yourself happiness even when life is hard.”

Shop These Are The Words by Nikita Gill (£7.99, Macmillan Children’s Books) at Bookshop

“I’m starting to think that living a dramatic, story-worthy life and happiness are, at worst, mutually exclusive, and, at best, giving each other a run for their money.”

Shop The Crane Wife by CJ Hauser (£16.99, Viking) at Bookshop

Shop Busy Being Free by Emma Forrest (£18.99, W&N) at Bookshop

“Indulge your imagination in every possible flight.”

Pride And Prejudice by Jane Austen (£7.99, Vintage) at Bookshop

“When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don’t seem to matter very much, do they?”

Shop The Collected Essays Of Virginia Woolf (£14.99, Benediction) at Waterstones

“Sometimes I imagine myself looking back on right now and I think like where will I be standing when I look back Will right now look like the beginning of a great life or… or what”

Shop A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (£9.99, Little Brown)

“We’ve been granted the mental capacities to make almost infinitely ambitious plans, yet practically no time at all to put them into action.”

Shop Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman (£9.99, Vintage) at Bookshop

“You see, Jude, in life, sometimes nice things happen to good people. You don’t need to worry—they don’t happen as often as they should. But when they do, it’s up to the good people to just say ‘thank you,’ and move on, and maybe consider that the person who’s doing the nice thing gets a bang out of it as well, and really isn’t in the mood to hear all the reasons that the person for whom he’s done the nice thing doesn’t think he deserves it or isn’t worthy of it.”

 Shop A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara (£10.99, Picador) at Bookshop

“Most of us prefer to believe we are the active subjects of our victories but only the passive objects of our defeats. We triumph, but it is not really we who fail – we are ruined by forces beyond our control.”

Shop Trust by Hernan Diaz (£16.98, Pan Macmillan) at Bookshop

“While she wanted to look neither to her past nor her future, she lived exclusively in both. They had took different paths, but they had journeyed, so she realised, together.”

Shop Brick Lane by Monica Ali (£9.99, Transworld) at Bookshop

“Sex and food and drink and books. You really don’t need much else. Maybe a nice view of the sky. Some shoes that don’t hurt. A bed and roof that won’t leak. Some singing, some music and tempo. A heart full and a soul fed, a head full of dreams and possibilities, what more could you possibly want? What more is there?”

Shop Mrs Death Misses Death by Salena Godden (£8.99, Canongate) at Bookshop

“Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing, in other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people.”

Shop Happening by Annie Ernaux and translated by Tanya Leslie (£8.99, Fitzcarraldo Editions) at Bookshop

“It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living. Easy to wish we’d developed other other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we’d worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga…

But it is not lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy.

We can’t tell if any of those other versions would of been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.” 

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig (£8.99, Canongate) at Bookshop

“It is difficult to translate a great love, a great life, into words on a page. It sounds so prosaic – raking leaves, smiling at each other in understanding – but it is in the everyday moments that the tenacity of love, and its depth, are often revealed.”

Shop Notes To Self: Essays by Emilie Pine (£9.99, Penguin) 

“What a terrible mess we can make of our lives. There should be angel police to stop us at these dangerous moments, but there don’t seem to be. So all we’re left with, my precious son, is whether we can forgive, be forgiven, and keep trying our best.”

Shop A Terrible Kindness by Jo Browning Wroe (£14.99, Faber) at Bookshop

“We can’t go over it, we can’t under it. Oh no! We have to go through it.”

Shop We’re Going On A Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen (£6.99, Walker) at Waterstones

“But it is difficult to rewrite the story of your life, especially when you have been telling it one way for so long.”

Shop Small Days And Nights by Tishani Doshi (£8.99, Bloomsbury)

“What matters most to me, is that I know how I feel, and the rest of the world might catch up one day, even if it’ll be a quiet revolution over longer than my lifetime, if it happens at all.”

Shop Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo (£8.99, Penguin) at Bookshop

“Shown her how life could reward the places where you least exerted effort, while denying what you desired and worked so ardently toward most.”

Shop Family Trust by Kathy Wang (£8.99, Head of Zeus) at Bookshop

“Living your life according to what everyone else might think of you is to cede control of who you are. It is to outsource your identity to a bunch of strangers who do not know you.”

Shop How To Fail by Elizabeth Day (£9.99, HarperCollins) at Bookshop

“We must believe in our souls that we are somebody, that we are significant, that we are worthful, and we must walk the streets of life every day with this sense of dignity and this sense of somebody-ness.”

Shop The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead (£8.99, Little, Brown) at Bookshop

“When you get up every day, I want you to remind yourself that tomorrow will be better than today. That you are a person of value. That you are important.”

Shop The Girl With The Louding Voice by Abi Daré (£8.99, Hodder & Stoughton) at Bookshop

“That the things in life which don’t go to plan are usually more important, more formative, in the long run, than the things that do”

I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes With Death by Maggie O’Farrell (£9.99, Headline) at Bookshop

“I’d been stupid to believe that employment would add value to my life.”

Shop My Year Of Rest And Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh (£9.99, Vintage) at Bookshop

“I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.”

Shop Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (£9.99, Penguin) at Waterstones

“Now I think it’s one of the most useless questions an adult can ask a child—What do you want to be when you grow up? As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something and that’s the end.”

Shop Becoming by Michelle Obama (£12.99, Penguin) at Bookshop

“We do not have to conform to the way our life has been written for us, especially by those who are less imaginative than ourselves.”

Shop Real Estate: A Living Autobiography by Deborah Levy (£8.99, Penguin) at Bookshop

“On the other hand, wasn’t that the very definitely of life? Constant adaptations brought about by a series of never-ending mistakes?”

Shop Lessons In Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus (£14.99, Transworld) at Bookshop

“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”

Shop The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (£14.99, Vintage) at Bookshop

“You only get one life. It’s actually your duty to live it as fully as possible.”

Shop Me Before You by Jojo Moyes (£9.99, Penguin) at Bookshop

“Poetry is not the most important thing in life… I’d much rather lie in a hot bath reading Agatha Christie and sucking sweets.”

Shop Dylan Thomas Omnibus: Under Milk Wood, Poems, Stories and Broadcasts (£10.99, Orion) at Bookshop

“It looked like the basket of someone keen to live life to the full.”

Shop Love, Nina by Nina Stibbe (£8.99, Penguin) at Waterstones

“Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.”

Shop The Most Of Nora Ephron by Nora Ephron (£10.99, Transworld) at Bookshop

Laugh as much as you breathe and love as long as you live.”

Shop The Long Song by Andrea Levy (£9.99, Headline) at Bookshop

“In everyone’s life there are people who stay and people who go and people who are taken against their will.”

Shop We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler (£8.99, Profile) at Bookshop

“This is why you must love life: one day you’re offering up your social security number to the Russian Mafia; two weeks later you’re using the word calve as a verb.”

Shop Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple (£8.99, Orion) at Bookshop

“And I’m learning not to read too much into good things. I’m learning just to appreciate the good while you have it in your sights. Not to worry so much about what it all means and what will happen next.”

Shop Maybe In Another Life by Taylor Jenkins Reid (£8.99, Simon & Schuster) at Bookshop

“I suppose sooner or later in the life of everyone comes a moment of trial. We all of us have our particular devil who rides us and torments us, and we must give battle in the end.”

Shop Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier (£8.99, Virago) at Bookshop

“Life is love and I have no love left. Love has drained itself from me, and run to a river like this one.”

Shop Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James (£9.99, Penguin) at Bookshop

“Live life as it was meant to be lived. Half asleep, preferably.”

Shop The Accidental Woman by Jonathan Coe (£8.99, Penguin) at Bookshop

“Some people could look at a mud puddle and see an ocean with ships.”

Shop Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (£9.99, Virago) at Bookshop

“Sometimes the things you’re convinced you don’t want turn out to be the thing you need the most in this world.”

Shop Boys Don’t Cry by Malorie Blackman (£8.99, Penguin) at Bookshop

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

Your Silence Will Not Protect You: Essays And Poems by Audre Lorde (£12.99, Silver Press) at Bookshop