928 Quotes by Franz Kafka

I was heading for the city in the south, of which they used to say in our village:‘There are people for you! Just think—they never go to sleep!’‘And why don’t they?’‘Because they’re fools.’‘Don’t fools get tired, then?’‘How could fools get tired?

Writing, when it springs from within, is like giving birth, and the child is covered in mucus

As I lie in bed I assume the shape of a big beetle, a stag beetle or a cockchafer, I think.

I stand on the end platform of the tram and am completely unsure of my footing in this world, in this town, in my family.

The Hunter has been turned into a butterfly. Do not laugh.

Logic may indeed be unshakeable, but it cannot withstand a man who is determined to live. Where was the judge he had never seen? Where was the High Court he had never reached? He raised his hands and spread out all his fingers. But the hands of one of the men closed round his throat, just as the other drove the knife deep into his heart and turned it twice.

Write to me only once a week, so that your letter arrives on Sunday — for I cannot endure your daily letters, I am incapable of enduring them. For instance, I answer one of your letters, then lie in bed in apparent calm, but my heart beats through my entire body and is conscious only of you. I belong to you

Our winters are very long here, very long and very monotonous. But we don't complain about it downstairs, we're shielded against the winter. Oh, spring does come eventually, and summer, and they last for a while, but now, looking back, spring and summer seem too short, as if they were not much more than a couple of days, and even on those days, no matter how lovely the day, it still snows occasionally.

There were dark hours, of course, such as came to everybody, in which you thought you had achieved nothing at all, in which it seemed to you that only the cases predestined from the start to seucceed came to a good end, which they would have reached in any event without your help, while every one of the others was doomed to fail in spite of all your manœuvres, all your exertions, all the illusory little victories on which you plumed yourself.