100 Quotes About Kafka

Batter Old King Cole and his merry soul than a hundred Franz Kafkas.

Better Old King Cole and his merry soul than a hundred Franz Kafkas.

The trouble is, I am not at peace with myself; I am not always "something," and if for once I am "something," I pay for it by "being nothing" for months on end.'—Kafka, quoted by Canetti

The corpses in the wasteland of past and present haunt us. We are still in Eliot's land of the dead, imprisoned in Kafka's penal colony, running from the unexplained rage of the golem, listening to Lovecraft's drumbeat of horror, and shivering in the chilly shadow of Grau and Murnau's Nosferatu. We cannot awaken from history.

sleep is the most innocent creature there is and a sleepless manthe most guilty.

Writing about Kafka in this day and age is just so easy: the world is more bizarre, senseless, surreal than ever—it would mean the student isn’t really exerting themselves; today, Kafka is just too relatable.

Die schwere Verwundung Gregors, an der er über einen Monat litt -- derApfel blieb, da ihn niemand zu entfernen wagte, als sichtbares Andenkenim Fleische sitzen --, schien selbst den Vater daran erinnert zu haben,daß Gregor trotz seiner gegenwärtigen traurigen und ekelhaften Gestaltein Familienglied war, das man nicht wie einen Feind behandeln durfte,sondern dem gegenüber es das Gebot der Familienpflicht war, denWiderwillen hinunterzuschlucken und zu dulden, nichts als dulden.

Nothing expresses Kafka’s innermost sense of self more profoundly than his lapidary definition of “writing as a form of prayer”: he was a writer. Not a man who wrote, but one to whom writing was the only form of being, the only means of defying death in life.

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.