I have spent all my life resisting the desire to end it.
FRANZ KAFKAI have spent all my life resisting the desire to end it.
FRANZ KAFKAI think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.
FRANZ KAFKAI’m tired, can’t think of anything and want only to lay my face in your lap, feel your hand on my head and remain like that through all eternity.
FRANZ KAFKAThere is an infinite amount of hope in the universe, but not for us.
FRANZ KAFKAPeople label themselves with all sorts of adjectives. I can only pronounce myself as ‘nauseatingly miserable beyond repair’.
FRANZ KAFKAWhat am I doing here in this endless winter?
FRANZ KAFKAThe person I am in the company of my sisters has been entirely different from the person I am in the company of other people. Fearless, powerful, surprising, moved as I otherwise am only when I write.
FRANZ KAFKADon’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, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.
FRANZ KAFKAThe 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 KAFKAKill me, or you are a murderer.
FRANZ KAFKAIn man’s struggle against the world, bet on the world.
FRANZ KAFKAYou are the knife I turn inside myself; that is love. That, my dear, is love.
FRANZ KAFKAHe was a tool of the boss, without brains or backbone.
FRANZ KAFKABeyond a certain point there is no return. This point has to be reached.
FRANZ KAFKAThe truth is always an abyss. One must — as in a swimming pool — dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later rise again — laughing and fighting for breath — to the now doubly illuminated surface of things.
FRANZ KAFKAA book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.
FRANZ KAFKA