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 … - Franz Kafka

A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.

One must lie low, no matter how much it went against the grain, and try to understand that this great organization remained, so to speak, in a state of delicate balance, and that if someone took it upon himself to alter the dispositions of things around him, he ran the risk of losing his footing and falling to destruction, while the organization would simply right itself by some compensating reaction in another part of its machinery – since everything interlocked – and remain unchanged, unless, indeed, which was very probable, it became still more rigid, more vigilant, severer, and more ruthless.

Evil is whatever distracts.

Every word first looks around in every direction before letting itself be written down by me.