“I feel a little peculiar around the children. For one thing, they grown. And I see they think me and Nettie and Shug and Albert and Samuel and Harpo and Sofia and Jack and Odessa real old and don’t know much what going on. But I don’t think us feel old at all. And us so happy. Matter of fact, I think this the youngest us ever felt.”

Shop The Color Purple by Alice Walker (£8.99, Orion) at Bookshop

“Sometimes she worried that she was too happy… And her joy would become a restless thing, flapping its wings inside her, as though looking for an opening to fly away.”

Shop Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (£8.99, HarperCollins) at Bookshop

“Spend your free time the way you like, not the way you think you’re supposed to. Stay home on New Year’s Eve if that’s what makes you happy. Skip the committee meeting. Cross the street to avoid making aimless chitchat with random acquaintances. Read. Cook. Run. Write a story. Make a deal with yourself that you’ll attend a set number of social events in exchange for not feeling guilty when you beg off.”

Shop Quiet by Susan Cain (£9.99, Penguin) at Bookshop

“One afternoon when he was there, I burned the living-room carpet down to the weft by placing a boiling coffee pot on top of it. I didn’t care. Quite the contrary. I was happy every time I caught sight of the mark as I remembered that afternoon with him.”

Shop Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux (£8.99, Fitzcarraldo) at Bookshop

“Happiness is a warm puppy.”

Shop The Peanuts Guide To Happiness by Charles M Schulz (£8.99, Canongate) at Bookshop

“When a chance for real happiness comes by, grab it with both hands and devour it. If it lasts five minutes or five lifetimes, it’s still worth it.”

Shop Checkmate by Malorie Blackman (£7.99, Penguin) at Bookshop

“I wish, as well as everybody else, to be perfectly happy; but, like everybody else, it must be in my own way.”

Shop Sense And Sensibility by Jane Austen (£14.99, Penguin) at Waterstones

“But you make me happy. It’s living up to being happy that’s the difficult part.”

Shop The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (£9.99, Vintage) at Waterstones

“There are lots of ways of being miserable, but there’s only one way of being comfortable, and that is to stop running round after happiness. If you make up your mind not to be happy there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have a fairly good time.”

Shop Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton (£6.99, Penguin) at Waterstones

“I should like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy and then, when I’m old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.” 

Shop Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (£8.99, Penguin) at Waterstones

“It is not in doing what you like, but in liking what you do that is the secret of happiness.”

Shop Peter Pan by JM Barrie (£6.99, Penguin) at Waterstones

“How about peaches, dear?” murmurs Madame Manec, and Marie-Laure can hear a can opening, juice slopping into a bowl. Seconds later, she’s eating wedges of wet sunlight.”

Shop All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (£8.99, HarperCollins) at Bookshop

“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.”

Shop The Unbearable Lightness Of Being by Milan Kundera (£8.99, Faber) at Bookshop

“If you’re happy in a dream, does that count?”

Shop The God Of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (£9.99, HarperCollins)

“What can I do with my happiness? How can I keep it, conceal it, bury it where I may never lose it? I want to kneel as it falls over me like rain, gather it up with lace and silk, and press it over myself again.”

Shop Henry And June by Anaïs Nin (£9.99, Penguin) at Bookshop

“There is no evidence that we’ve been placed on this planet to be especially happy or especially normal. And in fact our unhappiness and our strangeness, our anxieties and compulsions, those least fashionable aspects of our personalities, are quite often what lead us to do rather interesting things.”

Shop The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson (£9.99, Pan Macmillan) at Bookshop

“Laughter is poison to fear.”

Shop A Game Of Thrones by George RR Martin (£9.99, HarperCollins) at Bookshop

“It is the very mark of the spirit of rebellion to crave for happiness in this life.”

Shop Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen (£7.20, Independent) at Amazon

“I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy.”

Shop The Ocean At The End Of The Lane by Neil Gaiman (£8.99, Headline) at Bookshop

“Sometimes when things are particularly bad, my brain will give me a happy dream.”

Shop The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (£8.99, Scholastic) at Bookshop

“What people don’t understand about feeling such potent sadness is, when it lifts, it really lets you know what happiness means.”

Shop Are We All Lemmings And Snowflakes? by Holly Bourne (£7.99, Usborne) at Bookshop

“You make do with what you have. As you age you learn even to be happy with what you have.”

Shop What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami (£9.99, Vintage) at Bookshop

“That to truly know happiness is to know the fleeting nature of everything, joy, pain, safety and happiness itself.”

Shop Irma Voth by Miriam Toews (£8.99, Faber) at Bookshop

“And that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness. You can’t have one without the other. Of course, they come in different degrees and quantities. But there is no life where you can be in a state of sheer happiness for ever. And imagining there is just breeds more unhappiness in the life you’re in.”

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

“Want nothing but the best for your friends because when your friends are happy and successful, it’s probably going to be easier for you to be happy.”

Shop Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay (£13.99, Little, Brown) at Bookshop

“Just for the record: happiness is not bullshit.”

Shop Less by Andrew Sean Greer (£8.99, Little, Brown) at Bookshop

“I realized I’d always believed what other people said about me. What he’d said about me. We remember everything other people say about us, I think. Wear a skin made of all those words, so that when we look at ourselves in the mirror, that’s what we see. I was starting to pick that skin away, and I was happy. I liked what I found underneath.”

A Very Nice Girl by Imogen Crimp (£14.99, Bloomsbury) at Bookshop

“Perhaps our vision of how life should be is actually no fun at all, and neglects to include the exciting people we have yet to meet, who make the stupid ways life seems to happen, happy after all.”

Shop How Should A Person Be? by Sheila Heti (£9.99, Vintage) at Bookshop

“And will I tell you that these three lived happily ever after? I will not, for no one ever does. But there was happiness. And they did live.”

Shop The Dark Tower by Stephen King (£9.99, Hodder & Stoughton) at Bookshop

“What’s the point of doing all that work,” Tesch asks, “if no one sees it?” “It makes me happy. It’s peaceful, spending hours working on it. It doesn’t really matter to me if anyone else sees it.”

Shop Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel (£9.99, Pan Macmillan) at Bookshop

“The thing is, I don’t want my sadness to be othered from me just as I don’t want my happiness to be othered. They’re both mine. I made them, dammit.”

Shop On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong (£8.99, Vintage) at Bookshop

“People who have tried it, tell me that a clear conscience makes you very happy and contented; but a full stomach does the business quite as well, and is cheaper, and more easily obtained.”

Shop Three Men In A Boat by Jerome K Jerome (£6.99, Penguin) at Waterstones

“The happiness you feel is in direct proportion to the love you give.”

Shop What I Know For Sure by Oprah Winfrey (£14.99, Pan Macmillan) at Bookshop

“That’s the difference between me and the rest of the world! Happiness isn’t good enough for me! I demand euphoria!”

Shop Weirdos From Another Planet by Bill Watterson (£12.99, Little, Brown) at Bookshop

 “That was happiness. Not the framed greatest hits, but the moments between.”

Shop Today Will Be Different by Maria Semple (£8.99, Orion) at Bookshop

“‘I know my life’s meaningful because’ – and here he stopped, and looked shy, and was silent for a moment before he continued - ‘because I’m a good friend. I love my friends, and I care about them, and I think I make them happy.’ ”

Shop A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara (£10.99, Pan Macmillan)

“When happiness makes a guest appearance in one’s life, it’s important to make the most of it. It may not stay around for long and when it has gone wouldn’t it be terrible to think that all the time one could have been happy was wasted worrying.”

Shop Watermelon by Marian Keyes (£8.99, Penguin) at Bookshop

“I found him and he makes me happy. That’s enough for me. Who needs a forever?”

Shop Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi (£8.99, Faber) at Bookshop

“I felt truly happy for the first time in years. Such moments should be logged and noted.”

Shop Any Human Heart by William Boyd (£8.99, Penguin) at Bookshop

“Was it the happiest day of our lives? Probably not, if only because the truly happy days tend not to involve so much organisation, are rarely so public or so expensive. The happy ones sneak up, unexpected.”

Shop Us by David Nicholls (£9.99, Hodder & Stoughton) at Bookshop

“The mistake,” Sylvie said, “is thinking that love equates with happiness.”

Shop A God In Ruins by Kate Atkinson (£9.99, Transworld) at Bookshop

“The people in your happy memories have to be the same people who want to have you in their own happy memories.”

Shop The Collected Stories Of Lydia Davis by Lydia Davis (£10.99, Penguin) at Bookshop

“Before that she hadn’t realized how fragile happiness was, how if you were careless, you could knock it over and shatter it.”

Shop Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng (£8.99, Little, Brown) at Bookshop

“You must be the best judge of your own happiness.”

Shop Emma by Jane Austen (£7.99, Vintage) at Bookshop

“You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.”

Shop Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer (£8.99, Penguin) at Bookshop

“I may never be happy, but tonight I am content.”

Shop The Journals Of Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath (£20, Faber) at Bookshop

“Name one hero who was happy.”

Shop The Song Of Achilles by Madeline Miller (£9.99, Bloomsbury) at Bookshop

“I would always rather be happy than dignified.”

Shop Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (£12.99, Union Square) at Bookshop

“i have what i have and i am happy i’ve lost what i’ve lost and i am still happy”

Shop Milk And Honey by Rupi Kaur (£9.99, Andrews McMeel Publishing) at Bookshop

“Happiness is not a possession to be prized, it is a quality of thought, a state of mind.”

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