928 Quotes by Franz Kafka

I am always trying to convey something that can’t be conveyed, to explain something which is inexplicable, to tell about something I have in my bones, something which can be expressed only in the bones.

Un libro dev'essere un'ascia per il mare ghiacciato che è dentro di noi.

Un libro dev'essere un'ascia per il mare ghiacciato che è dentro di noi.(da una lettera a Oskar Pollak, novembre 1903).

He is a land surveyor, well, perhaps that is something, he has trained at something, but if there's nothing you can do with that training then it means nothing.

As Karl Rossmann, a poor boy of sixteen who had been packed off to America by his parents because a servant girl had seduced him and got herself with child by him, stood on the liner slowly entering the harbour of New York, a sudden burst of sunshine seemed to illumine the Statue of Liberty, so that he saw it in a new light, although he had sighted it long before. The arm with the sword rose up as if newly stretched aloft, and round the figure blew the free winds of heaven.

One morning Gregor Samsa found himself, in bed, transformed into a monstrous vermin.

Amália sorriu e, apesar de triste, o sorriso iluminou o rosto sombrio e fechado, fez falar o que silenciava, tornou familiar o que era estranho: era a entrega de um segredo, de uma posse até então bem guardada, que na verdade podia ser tomada outra vez de volta, mas nunca por completo.

I have spent all my life resisting the desire to end it.

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 face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more