Survive long enough....

Survive long enough and you get to a far point in life where nothing else of particular interest is going to happen. After that, if you don't watch out, you can spend all your time tallying your losses and gains in endless narrative. All you love has fled or been taken away. Everything fallen from you except the possibility of jolting and unforwarned memory springing out of the dark, rushing over you with the velocity of heartbreak.

-Thirteen Moons, Charles Frazier

"I believe, one should read only such books, which bite and sting. If the book, which we read, does not wake us with a blow on the head,as with a fist hammering on our skulls, then why do we read it? We need the books, which affect us like a disaster, a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must the axe be for the frozen sea in us."

-Kafka