When I am not reading Kafka I am thinking about Kafka. When I am not thinking about Kafka I miss thinking about him. Having missed thinking about him for a while, I take him out and read him again. That’s how it works.

... to pour out one's heart and not drink vodka at the same time, well, that is inconceivable for a Russian soul...

[...] la mera pronunciación de estas dos palabras [...] llega a ser algo tan odioso, tan repelente que basta con decir una sola vez y para que uno enseguida sienta unas ganas tremendas de vomitar [...]

...végső soron az egyszerű bizalmat abban, hogy van hagyomány, hogy ez a hagyomány a megfigyelésre, az ismétlésre és a természet belső rendjének és a dolgok természetének a tiszteletére épül, s hogy ennek a hagyománynak sem az értelme, sem a tisztasága kétségbe nem vonható.

Death, he felt, was only a kind of warning rather than a desperate and permanent end.

Memory is the art of forgetting.

Culture, then, only truly becomes culture when it is embodied in someone.

Europeans believe that culture is something they can grasp and touch because, for them, culture is comprised of objects, or remnants of objects, and this object, this remnant, conceals within it the essence of the original. For the Chinese, the matter is completely different---for them, the essence of culture can only be preserved in spiritual form.

Faith, thought Eszter . . . is not a matter of believing something, but believing that somehow things could be different; in the same way, music was not the articulation of some better part of ourselves, or a reference to some notion of a better world, but a disguising of the fact of our irredeemable selves and the sorry state of the world, but no, not merely a disguising but a complete, twisted denial of such facts: it was a cure that did not work, a barbiturate that functioned as an opiate.

The only revolutionary feeling he was aware of, or so he considered while standing in the doorway, was pride, his own pride, a pride that did not allow him to understand that there was no qualitative difference between things, a presumptuous over-confidence which condemned him to ultimate disillusion, for to live according to the spirit of qualitative difference requires superhuman qualities.