Dimitris Michailidis

“In what disorder we lived, how many fragments of ourselves were scattered, as if to live were to explode into splinters.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

“The things I do not dare to do will transform into stories.”
― Georgi Gospodinov, Time Shelter

“I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground

“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