“I think we ought to read only the kind of books
that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a
blow on the head, what are we reading it for? ...we need the books that affect
us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved
more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a
suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.”—German-speaking
Bohemian Jewish novelist and short-story writer Franz Kafka (1883-1924), letter
to Oskar Pollak, Jan. 27, 1904, in Letters to Friends, Family and Editors,
translated by Richard and Clara Winston (1987)
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