928 Quotes by Franz Kafka

Kill me, or you are a murderer.

The limited circle is pure.

It puzzled K., at least it puzzled him looking at it from the policemen's point of view, that they had made him go into the room and left him alone there, where he had ten different ways of killing himself. At the same time, though, he asked himself, this time looking at it from his own point of view, what reason he could have to do so. Because those two were sitting there in the next room and had taken his breakfast, perhaps?

But what if all the tranquility, all the comfort, all the contentment were now to come to a horrifying end?

I am more uncertain than I ever was; I feel only the power of life. And I am senselessly empty.

You're not cross with me, though?" he said. She pulled her hand away and answered, "No, no, I'm never cross with anyone.

One of the first signs of the beginnings 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 will only in time come to hate.

I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones. Basically it is nothing other than this fear we have so often talked about, but fear spread to everything, fear of the greatest as of the smallest, fear, paralyzing fear of pronouncing a word, although this fear may not only be fear but also a longing for something greater than all that is fearful.

Oh well, memories, said I. Yes, even remembering in itself is sad, yet how much more its object! Don't let yourself in for things like that, it's not for you and not for me. It only weakens one's present position without strengthening the former one - nothing is more obvious - quite apart from the fact that the former one doesn't need strengthening.