A Quote by Franz Kafka

A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.

Franz Kafka

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Axe Book Break Frozen Ice Inside Must Our Seas Soul

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Franz Kafka
German - Novelist
July 3, 1883 - June 3, 1924

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.

Franz Kafka

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.

Franz Kafka

A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us.

J. M. Coetzee

A book should serve as an axe to the ice inside us.

Franz Kafka

We need the 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 inside us.

Franz Kafka

On the wall next to the table, next to the scones that provided each table with its own circle of lamplight were quotations about reading, her favorite of which was from Kafka: 'A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.

Haven Kimmel

An ice-fishing shanty is basically a tin outhouse on a frozen lake, except that in an outhouse, the hole has a purpose. In ice fishing, the hole is what you stare at for hours, hoping that at some point you'll break the monotony by falling in.

W. Bruce Cameron

Apart from the obvious advantages of having ice to melt, filter, then drink, you can also break apart the water's hydrogen from its oxygen. Use the hydrogen and some of the oxygen as active ingredients in rocket fuel and keep the rest of the oxygen for breathing. And in your spare time between space missions, you can always go ice skating on the frozen lake created with the extracted water.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

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.

Jodi Picoult

You're gonna catch a cold from the ice inside your soul

Christina Perri

We must be wise taskmasters and not require of ourselves what we cannot possibly perform. Recreation we must have. Otherwise, the strings of our soul, wound up to an unnatural tension, will break.

Elizabeth Prentiss

There must be 15 shows about people's jobs: 'Ice Road Trucker,' 'Axe Men,' 'Dirty Jobs.' Unemployment is so high, we're watching people work.

Dov Davidoff

The road was frozen. The village lay quiet under the cold sky. Komako hitched up the skirt of her kimono and tucked it into her obi. The moon shone like a blade frozen in blue ice.

Yasunari Kawabata

A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.

Franz Kafka

How strange and wonderful is our home, our earth, with its swirling vaporous atmosphere, its flowing and frozen liquids, its trembling plants, its creeping, crawling, climbing creatures, the croaking things with wings that hang on rocks and soar through the fog, the furry grass, the scaly seas.

Edward Abbey

Flea-Market vendors are frozen mid-haggle. Middle-aged women are frozen in the middle of their lives. The gavels of frozen judges are frozen between guilt and innocence. On the ground are the crystals of the frozen first breaths of babies, and those of the last gasps of the dying.

Jonathan Safran Foer

A Quote by Franz Kafka

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