A Quote by Franz Kafka
The purpose of a story is to be an axe that breaks up the ice within us.
Related Quotes
A book should serve as an axe to the ice inside us.
If the literature we are reading does not wake us, why then do we read it? A literary work must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.
Things break all the time. Glass and dishes and fingernails. Cars and contracts and potato chips. You can break a record, a horse, a dollar. You can break the ice. There are coffee breaks and lunch breaks and prison breaks. Day breaks, waves break, voices break. Chains can be broken. So can silence, and fever... promises break. Hearts break.
I now know that experience comes to us for a purpose, and if we follow the guidance of the spirit within us, we will probably find that the purpose is a good one.
The Christian life is very much like climbing a hill of ice. You cannot slide up, nay, you have to cut every step with an ice axe; only with incessant labor in cutting and chipping can you make any progress... If you want to know how to backslide, leave off going forward. Cease going upward and you will go downward of necessity. You can never stand still.
When we moved from 'Ice Age' to 'Ice Age 2,' we were really stuck; a story didn't just organically emerge. While I'm very proud of 'Ice Age 2,' from a storytelling sense, it's a very thin story.
I firmly believe that the purpose of life is not this life. It is to equip us, whatever our role is going to be in the next life. And understanding God's story is really where I find the significance and purpose in my own story.
. . . The books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation-a book should serve as an axe for the frozen sea within us.
If you come face to face with some really challenging situations and tragic circumstances - you are going in there with a purpose. You are not going in there as a tourist. You're not going there just to merely observe. You have a purpose, and your purpose is to tell that story, to share that story for the bigger benefit of millions of other people. Your purpose is to create that bridge so you can give that story the dignity and the focus that it deserves, and you can become a part of the amplification that needs to be there.
A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.
I do have a Viking axe by the bed if I need to whack someone... My wife bought me a Viking axe - the axe side curls down so you can grab the adversary around the neck and you can use it to climb walls, as a grappling hook.
Death teaches us to live; it gives us a boundary to map our living within. Death's hammer breaks through the mirror separating us from light.
Foreign novels are less action-oriented. They have a different pace; they’re more reflective. They challenge us to look for the story, find the story within the story.
If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read? So that it shall make us happy? Good God, we should also be happy if we had no books, and such books as make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. But what we must have are those books which come upon us like ill fortune, and distress us deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves; like suicide. A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.
Women to whom one has just been introduced think that it breaks the ice if they scream, 'Goodness, you're tall!' How would they like it if I broke the ice first, by screaming 'Goodness, what thick ankles!' or 'Goodness, what a bust!
I have not chosen to create a linear story, but a series of different narratives: in the end there are five plays that almost, but don't quite, add up to one play... I start with the story of Candide, being performed as a play within a play, to bring the audience up to speed with the story.
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