Banashri

“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

“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“It’s raining, and as if the rain had made them hunch forward, my feelings lower their stupid gaze to the ground, where water flows and nourishes nothing, washes nothing, cheers up nothing. It’s raining, and I suddenly feel the terrible weight of being an animal that doesn’t know what it is, dreaming its thought and emotion, withdrawn into a spatial region of being as into a hovel, satisfied by a little heat as by an eternal truth.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition