Franz Kafka

Quotes

• “The bliss of murder! The relief, the soaring ecstasy from the shedding of another's blood! Wese, old nightbird, friend, ...”
• “What an obstacle had suddenly arisen to block K.'s career! And this was the moment when he was supposed to work for the ...”
• “Verlassen sind wir doch wie verirrte Kinder im Walde. Wenn Du vor mir stehst und mich ansiehst, was weißt Du von den Sch...”
• “Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his...”
• “He thought back on his family with deep emotion and love. His conviction that he would have to disappear was, if possibl...”
• “If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skulls, then why do we read it? Good God, w...”
• “I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up wi...”
• “What a fate: to be condemned to work for a firm where the slightest negligence at once gave rise to the gravest suspicio...”
• “Eternal childhood. Life calls again. It is entirely conceivable that life's splendour forever lies in wait about each on...”
• “I'm interested in how power works … Franz Kafka just knows, man. He knows how power works. In terms of lessons for young...”
• “I can prove at any time that my education tried to make another person out of me than the one I became. It is for the ha...”
• “[Reverence for Kafka has been] the ideological origin of all the theories and tendencies of the "third way to socialism"...”
• “Logic may indeed be unshakeable, but it cannot withstand a man who is determined to live. Where was the judge he had nev...”
• “A man once said: Why such reluctance? If you only followed the parables you yourselves would become parables and with th...”
• “He writes about his father, but he is actually writing a diatribe against the fascist state, against a Germanized Prague...”
• “What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ...”
• “When . . . some leisurely passer-by stopped . . . and spoke of cheating, that was in its way the stupidest lie ever inve...”
• “Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine mor...”
• “All knowledge, the totality of all questions and all answers, is contained in the dog. If one could but realize this kno...”
• “There's no quiet place here on earth for our love, not in the village and not anywhere else, so I picture a grave, deep ...”
• “He is interested in the feelings of the squash ball, and of the champagne bottle that launches the ship. In a football m...”
• “It's strange that my work has been classified as magic realism because I see my novels as just being realistic literatur...”
• “The whole art of Kafka consists in forcing the reader to re-read. His endings or his absence of endings, suggest explana...”
• “The only way Kafka could envisage of creating his in every respect impossible writing possible was to demarcate the area...”
• “Hey, there's something falling down in there," said the chief clerk. Gregor tried to suppose to himself that what had ha...”
• “Attributed to Kafka in Ambiguous Spaces (2008) by NaJa & deOstos (Nannette Jackowski and Ricardo de Ostos), p. 7, and a ...”
• “The whole visible world is perhaps nothing more than the rationalization of a man who wants to find peace for a moment. ...”
• “Gustav Janouch, Conversations With Kafka: Notes and Reminiscences (1953), page 71, London: Derek Verschoyle; frequently ...”
• “Klaus Gysi, speech at the twentieth anniversary of the opening of the German National Theatre in Weimar (September 1968)...”
• “I dream of a grave, deep and narrow, where we could clasp each other in our arms as with clamps, and I would hide my fac...”
• “You asking me the way?" "Yes," I said, "since I can't find it myself." "Give it up! Give it up!" said he, and turned wit...”
• “...it is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary.' 'A melancholy conclusion,' s...”
• “Variant translation: The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after his a...”
• “Don't you want to join us?" I was recently asked by an acquaintance when he ran across me alone after midnight in a coff...”
• “Now the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence... Someone might possibly have escap...”
• “They're talking about things of which they don't have the slightest understanding, anyway. It's only because of their st...”
• “Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather...”
• “Variant translation: The Policeman said to me, "You want to know the way? Give up! Just give up!" And he turned away lik...”
• “The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after his arrival; he will come,...”
• “Variant translation (by David Wyllie): One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transf...”
• “Kafka described with wonderful imaginative power the future concentration camps, the future instability of the law, the ...”
• “David Auerbach "Encyclopedia Frown Wikipedia is amazing. But it's become a rancorous, sexist, elitist, stupidly bureaucr...”
• “Chava Rosenfarb "Laterna Magika, Prague 1993" in Confessions of a Yiddish Writer and Other Essays, translated from the Y...”
• “Translation: Evil knows of the Good, but Good does not know of Evil. Knowledge of oneself is something only Evil has. - ...”
• “When I first read Kafka, I constantly had the feeling that I was writing it myself. It was as if I'd had a similar basic...”
• “Anyone who believes cannot experience miracles. By day one does not see any stars. Anyone who does miracles says: I cann...”
• “By believing passionately in something which still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not...”
• “But beneath its reasonably serene surface, the website can be as ugly and bitter as 4chan and as mind-numbingly bureaucr...”
• “Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheuren Ungeziefe...”
• “Variant translation: Somebody must have slandered Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one ...”