Daniel Knepp

“Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“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

“By its nature, the metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange.”
― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

“Where misunderstanding serves others as an advantage, one is helpless to make oneself understood”
― Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society