Literary (dis)pleasure

Franz Kafka, in a letter to Oskar Pollack:

I think we ought to read only books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us like a blow on the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good God, we would be just as happy 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 the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we love 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. That is my belief.

Between a rock and a hard place

What wins in the end: rationality or Asian values? 

It's really a choice of whether you want to lose the respect of the people you love most, or to lose the respect you have for yourself.