Quotes from Franz Kafka

The man in ecstasy and the man drowning - both throw up their arms. The first to signify harmony, the second to signify strife with the elements.

Then his head sank to the floor of its own accord and from his nostrils came the last faint flicker of his breath.

If something good has lost its way into you, it will make its escape overnight. I know you.

The Expulsion from Paradise is eternal in its principal aspect: this makes it irrevocable, and our living in this world inevitable, but the eternal nature of the process has the effect that not only could we remain forever in Paradise, but that we are currently there, whether we know it or not.

Oh, plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope--but not for us.

I'll shut myself off from everyone to the point of insensibility. Make an enemy of everyone, speak to no one.

If you come to me you will be leaping into the abyss.

4 December. To die would mean nothing else than to surrender a nothing to the nothing, but that would be impossible to conceive, for how could a person, even only as a nothing, consciously surrender himself to the nothing, and not merely to an empty nothing but rather to a roaring nothing whose nothingness consists only in its incomprehensibility.

It is as if I were made of stone, as if I were my own tombstone, there is no loophole for doubt or for faith, for love or repugnance, for courage or anxiety, in particular or in general, only a vague hope lives on, but no better than the inscriptions on tombstones.

So perhaps the best resource is to meet everything passively, to make yourself an inert mass, to stare at others with the eyes of an animal, to feel no compunction, with your own hand to throttle down whatever ghostly life remains in you.

If they were shocked, then Gregor had no further responsibility and could be calm. But if they took everything calmly, he he, too, had no reason to get excited and could, if he hurried, actually be at the station by eight o'clock.

Writer speaks a stench.

It isn't necessary that you leave home. Sit at your desk and listen. Don't even listen, just wait. Don't wait, be still and alone. The whole world will offer itself to you.

There are times when I am convinced I am unfit for any human relationship.

What do I have in common with Jews? I hardly have anything in common with myself, and really ought to go stand myself perfectly still in a corner, grateful to be able to breathe.

You've seen yourself how difficult the writing is to decipher with your eyes, but our man deciphers it with his wounds.

A picture of my existence... would show a useless wooden stake covered in snow... stuck loosely at a slant in the ground in a ploughed field on the edge of a vast open plain on a dark winter night.

Peaceful moon. I consist only of bones.

I ought to be able to invent words capable of blowing the odor of corpses in a direction other than straight into mine and the reader's face.

and i would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more

They were offered the choice between becoming kings or the couriers of kings. The way children would, they all wanted to be couriers. Therefore there are only couriers who hurry about the world, shouting to each other - since there are no kings - messages that have become meaningless. They would like to put an end to this miserable life of theirs but they dare not because of their oaths of service.

The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired. Only after death, only in solitude, does a man's true nature emerge. In death, as on the chimney sweep's Saturday night, the soot gets washed from his body.

The crows assert that a single crow could destroy the heavens. This is certainly true, but it proves nothing against the heavens, because heaven means precisely: the impossibility of crows.

The purpose of a story is to be an axe that breaks up the ice within us.