my favourite Kafka quotes
“April 27. Incapable of living with people, of speaking. Complete immersion in myself, thinking of myself. Apathetic, witless, fearful. I have nothing to say to anyone - never.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923
“Forget everything. Open the windows. Clear the room. The wind blows through it. You see only its emptiness, you search in every corner and don’t find yourself.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923
“2 November. This morning, for the first time in a long time, the joy again of imagining a knife twisted in my heart.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923
“My condition is not unhappiness, but it is also not happiness, not indifference, not weakness, not fatigue, not another interest – so what is it then?”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923
“My job is unbearable to me because it conflicts with my only desire and my only calling, which is literature. Since I am nothing but literature and can and want to be nothing else, my job will never take possession of me, it may, however, shatter me completely, and this is by no means a remote possibility.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923
“Peaceful moon. I consist only of bones.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923
“I am free and that is why I am lost.”
― Franz Kafka
“A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity."
[Letter to Max Brod, July 5, 1922]”
― Franz Kafka
“Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.”
― Franz Kafka
“One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die. This life appears unbearable, another unattainable. One is no longer ashamed of wanting to die; one asks to be moved from the old cell, which one hates, to a new one, which one willl only in time come to hate. In this there is also a residue of belief that during the move the master will chance to come along the corridor, look at the prisoner and say: "This man is not to be locked up again, He is to come with me.”
― Franz Kafka, Blue Octavo Notebooks
“In a way, you are poetry material; You are full of cloudy subtleties I am willing to spend a lifetime figuring out. Words burst in your essence and you carry their dust in the pores of your ethereal individuality.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena
“Last night I dreamed about you. What happened in detail I can hardly remember, all I know is that we kept merging into one another. I was you, you were me. Finally you somehow caught fire.”
― Franz Kafka
“The Kafka paradox: art depends on truth, but truth, being indivisable, cannot know itself: to tell the truth is to lie. thus the writer is the truth, and yet when he speaks he lies.”
― Franz Kafka
“Please — consider me a dream.”
― Franz Kafka