marcel

“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

“When I was really small I thought I’d do anything to change whatever was wrong with me. Now I didn’t want to change, I just wanted people to stop being mad at me all the time.”
― Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

“Why are they all trying to make me into a saint?
Oh God! Oh God!
I want to do things. Stop turning me into a saint.”
― Andrei Tarkovsky, Journal 1970-1986

“Beauty is as close to terror
as we can well endure.
Angels would not condescend
to damn our meagre souls.
That is why they awe
and why they terrify us so.
Every angel is terrible!”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Duino Elegies