I first read Zen and the Art of the Motorcycle Maintenance and then Lila. I would recommend reading them in that order as Pirsig intended. The way he captures complex social mechanisms and examines them based off of their humanistic effect is genius and, for me, life changing. I couldn't encourage you enough to give this book a try. To me, this quote is Pirsig's epiphany about how what he call "an 'objective scientific' view of life" (reenforced by the common thought of his era) brought about an era of everyman-for-himself mentality and spiritual loneliness. The concepts he develops in his first and second book are intended to solve many of these perceptual problems inherent in western society by examining the issues brought up in everyday life and morally reacting to them (as he calls it, seeing and reacting to the highest level of "quality" in each moment). I am probably biased towards these books because I used the concepts in them to improve myself and therefore cannot reject them. I still believe that others can do the same. If you give them a try please get back to me and say what you thought about them, i've wanted to have some feedback from someone else for a while now.