Quotes from Franz Kafka

Our winters are very long here, very long and very monotonous. But we don't complain about it downstairs, we're shielded against the winter. Oh, spring does come eventually, and summer, and they last for a while, but now, looking back, spring and summer seem too short, as if they were not much more than a couple of days, and even on those days, no matter how lovely the day, it still snows occasionally.

Conversations bore me, to visit people bores me, the sorrows and joys of my relatives bore me to my soul.

It receives you when you come and dismisses you when you go.

Test yourself on mankind. It is something that makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe.

Maybe innocence makes its way easiest through the elemental chaos of this world...

In a way, I was safe writing

My writing was all about you; all I did there, after all, was to bemoan what I could not bemoan upon your breast.

I don't feel particularly proud of myself. But when I walk alone in the woods or lie in the meadows, all is well.

Like tired dogs they stand there, because they use up all their strength in remaining upright in one's memory.

you are the knife i turn inside myself; that is love, that, my dear, is love

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

Some deny the existence of misery by pointing to the sun; he denies the existence of the sun by pointing to misery.

Two tasks at the beginning of your life: to narrow your orbit more and more, and ever and again to check whether you are not in hiding somewhere outside your orbit.

There are times when my longing for you overwhelms me […] so often I can think of you only with teeth clenched.

They did not know what we can now sense as we contemplate the course of history: that change begins in the soul before it shows in our lives...

However, Gregor had become much calmer. All right, people did not understand his words any more, although they seemed clear enough to him, clearer than previously, perhaps because had gotten used to them

In argument similes are like songs in love; they describe much, but prove nothing.

Was he an animal if music could captivate him so? It seemed to him that he was being shown the way to the unknown nourishment he had been yearning for.

A belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light.

And actually it is not you at all I love, but rather the existence you have bestowed on me

Gregor's serious wound, from which he suffered for over a month - the apple remained imbedded in his flesh as a visible souvenir since no one dared to remove it - seemed to have reminded even his father that Gregor was a member of the family, in spite of his present pathetic and repulsive shape, who could not be treated as an enemy; that, on the contrary, it was the commandment of the family duty to swallow their disgust and endure him, endure him and nothing more.

But questions that don't answer themselves at the very moment of their asking are never answered.

Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheueren Ungeziefer verwandelt.

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for?