I think we ought to read the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us with a blow in the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the kind of 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 the forests far from everyone, like suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.
Franz Kafka, in a letter to Oskar Pollak, 27 Jan. 1904, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors, trans. Richard and Clara Winston [New York, 1977]
