100 Quotes About Kafka

If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without ascending it, the work would have been permitted.(Wenn es möglich gewesen wäre, den Turm von Babel zu erbauern ohne ihn zu erklettern, es wäre erlaubt worden.)

Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes a part of the ceremony.(Leoparden brechen in den Tempel ein und saufen die Opferkrüge leer; das wiederholt sich immer wieder; schließlich kann man es vorausberechnen, und es wird ein Teil der Zeremonie.)

For a good part of his [Kafka's] work consists of tentative steps toward perpetually changing possibilities of future. He does not acknowledge a single future, there are many; this multiplicity of futures paralyzes him and burdens his step.

If, in the Judaic perception, the language of the Adamic was that of love, the grammars of fallen man are those of the legal code.

I am a typical example of Western Jew. This means I don't have a moment of peace, that nothing has come easily to me, not just the present and the future, but even the past, that thing that each man receives as his birth-right: even that I have to conquer, and perhaps that is the hardest task.

Not everything written on Kafka is Kafkology. How then to define Kafkology? By a tautology: Kafkology is discourse for Kafkologizing Kafka. For replacing Kafka with the Kafkologized Kafka.

No writer in our time has been more isolated than Kafka, and yet few have achieved communication as well as he did.

Comparison is the most abused intellectual tool of all. We compare men and women, man and God, good and bad, equal and unequal, forgetting that this sin only results in a punishment so severe that we can't even trace it back to its origins. All we're left with in the end is ambiguity, uncertainty, lethargy and and Kafka!

The anticipation of an authoritative disclosure of meaning is the means by which that authority is attributed and installed: the anticipation conjures its object.