The axe for the frozen sea – Kafka

 

“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.”

- Franz Kafka writes in a Letter to Oskar Pollak (27 January 1904)

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