Chris Via

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? 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 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 within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka

“All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings

“One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“In the beginning God created man in His own image, and man has been trying to repay the favor ever since.”
― Voltaire