Coming across lots of quotes from Kafka for some reason, most likely because I was in Prague last week.

Liked this:

Now the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence... Someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence, certainly never.

(The Silence of the Sirens, October 1917)

And may well make a title from somewhere in the last beautiful melodrama of this:

"... we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.  ...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 should be an axe to break the frozen sea inside us."

(Letter to Oskar Pollak, 27 January 1904)

*

Ant Hampton meanwhile sent the image below after my brief writing about a guy seen at the airport here. Ant's picture reminded me that years ago I filmed a weary looking guy for ages, as he waited at Manchester Airport, with a sign that read BROTHER. It meant the computer firm I am pretty sure... but the other possibility was too strong to resist.