Quote by Franz Kafka: “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”

Great literature doesn't just comfort or entertain — it breaks something open inside you, forcing you to feel and think in ways you were avoiding. Kafka believed that reading is supposed to be disturbing, that books which don't challenge you deeply are not worth the time.

Kafka wrote this in a letter to his friend Oskar Pollak in 1904, when he was barely twenty years old and had published nothing. The Habsburg Empire was still formally intact but beginning to fracture, and Kafka's Prague was a city of competing languages and identities in which he felt perpetually out of place.

Czech-German writer whose novels and stories, including The Trial and The Metamorphosis, created a body of work so distinctive that 'Kafkaesque' entered everyday language as a description of nightmarish bureaucracy. Writing mostly in German, he published little in his lifetime and asked his friend Max Brod to burn his manuscripts after his death.