Christina

“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

“Being close to her was like being warmed by a bonfire, and I had been cold for a long time.”
― Nghi Vo, The Empress of Salt and Fortune

“Stealing from one author is plagiarism; from many authors, research.”
― Walter Moers, The City of Dreaming Books

“The abbey at Singing Hills would say that if a record cannot be perfect, it should at least be present. Better for it to exist than for it to be perfect and only in your mind.”
― Nghi Vo, The Empress of Salt and Fortune