Quotes from Franz Kafka

If there is a transmigration of souls then I am not yet on the bottom rung. My life is a hesitation before birth.

We are separated from God on two sides; the Fall separates us from Him, the Tree of Life separates Him from us.

Now I can look at you in peace; I don't eat you any more.

In a way, you are poetry material; You are full of cloudy subtleties I am willing to spend a lifetime figuring out. Words burst in your essence and you carry their dust in the pores of your ethereal individuality.

I do not speak as I think, I do not think as I should, and so it all goes on in helpless darkness.

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

Better to have, and not need, than to need, and not have.

You are at once both the quiet and the confusion of my heart.

They say ignorance is bliss.... they're wrong

Yours (now I'm even losing my name - it was getting shorter and shorter all the time and is now: Yours)

I need solitude for my writing; not 'like a hermit' - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man.

In man's struggle against the world, bet on the world.

May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.

How about if I sleep a little bit longer and forget all this nonsense

One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die. This life appears unbearable, another unattainable. One is no longer ashamed of wanting to die; one asks to be moved from the old cell, which one hates, to a new one, which one willl only in time come to hate. In this there is also a residue of belief that during the move the master will chance to come along the corridor, look at the prisoner and say: This man is not to be locked up again, He is to come with me.

April 27. Incapable of living with people, of speaking. Complete immersion in myself, thinking of myself. Apathetic, witless, fearful. I have nothing to say to anyone - never.

People label themselves with all sorts of adjectives. I can only pronounce myself as 'nauseatingly miserable beyond repair'.

You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.

It would have been so pointless to kill himself that, even if he had wanted to, the pointlessness would have made him unable.

Written kisses don't reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts.

Beyond a certain point there is no return. This point has to be reached.

My peers, lately, have found companionship through means of intoxication--it makes them sociable. I, however, cannot force myself to use drugs to cheat on my loneliness--it is all that I have--and when the drugs and alcohol dissipate, will be all that my peers have as well.

I dream of a grave, deep and narrow, where we could clasp each other in our arms as with clamps, and I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more

Most men are not wicked... They are sleep-walkers, not evil evildoers.