Franz Kafka Quotes

. . . The books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation-a book should serve as an axe for the frozen sea within us.

Books don't change people; paragraphs do, Sometimes even sentences.

Books are the mirrors of the soul.

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.

When I read Jerome D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye" that was the first time I felt my mind blow open. I thought that book was speaking to me. I was 12 or 13 when I read that. I read everything on my mother's bookshelves.

Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own - but that we could never have described on our own.

One always, sooner or later, comes upon a city which is an image of one's inner cities. Fez is an image of my inner self. ... The layers of the city of Fez are like the layers and secrecies of the inner life. One needs a guide. ... There were in Fez, as in my life, streets which led nowhere, impasses which remained a mystery.

I remember reading The Bluest Eye when I was a young parent, and something opened in me. That's the highest aspiration.

I don't know where the line is. I don't know how much of myself is in Walter. There's got to be a bit of him there.

I believe in choosing the hardest book imaginable. I believe in reading up on what others have to say about this difficult book, and then making up my own mind.

Good books leave an impression. Great books forever alter the way you think about what it means to be alive. You Disappear is not just a well-told story, but a dramatic recalibrating of what it means to have a mind-and a soul.

Everything I've ever felt, but could never put into words, is poetically orchestrated through Mat Devine 's writing. In a lonely world, a book like this will make you feel like you belong. Simply put, Weird War One changed my life.

Nervous breakdowns can be highly underrated methods of spiritual transformation.

I probably coughed self-pityingly in response, little aware that I was about to cross a tremendous threshold beyond which there would be no return, that in my hands I held an object whose simple appearance belied its profound power. All true readers have a book, a moment, like the one I describe, and when Mum offered me that much-read library copy mine was upon me.

A great novel is a kind of conversion experience. We come away from it changed.

By making the place and the people and the feelings real, by the time someone closes the cover of one of my books, they have, hopefully, felt all of the emotions of life.

It always shocked me when I realized that I wasn’t the only person in the world who thought and felt such strange and awful things.

After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own. Music always seems to me to produce that effect. It creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one’s tears.

Every reader, I suspect, has a book like this somewhere in his or her past, a book that seemed to hold within it, at that moment, all the mysteries of the universe.

Few things linger longer or become more indwelling than that feeling of both completion and emptiness when a great book ends. That the book accompanies the reader forever from that day forward is part of literature's profligate generosity.

A great book should leave you with many experiences.

I firmly believe there are books whose greatness actually enable you to live.

A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.

I would hope that people, no matter what age, would find something to identify with in my books, pick one up and experience a personal sense of discovery. That's great. But for them, not for me.

Sad stories make good books