Franz Kafka
80 quotes
Biography
Franz Kafka was a German-language Jewish Czech writer and novelist born in Prague, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Widely regarded as a major figure of 20th-century literature, his works fuse elements of realism and the fantastique, and typically feature isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surreal predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers.
"Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self."
"A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us."
"I am a cage, in search of a bird."
"Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old."
"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, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly."
"I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness."
"The meaning of life is that it stops."
"A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity."[Letter to Max Brod, July 5, 1922]"
"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us."
"Books are a narcotic."
"Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself."
"He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived."
"I need solitude for my writing; not 'like a hermit' - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man."
"L'éternité, c'est long ... surtout vers la fin."
"This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me."
"May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air."
"The 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."
"We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes."
"Kill me, or you are a murderer."
"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."
"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 must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us."
"Even the merest gesture is holy if it is filled with faith."
"Writing is prayer."
"Every word first looks around in every direction before letting itself be written down by me."
"From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back."