Quotes from Franz Kafka

I am too tired, I must try to rest and sleep, otherwise I am lost in every respect. What an effort to keep alive! Erecting a monument does not require an expenditure of so much strength.

I can't think of anything to write about, I'm just walking around here between the lines, under the light of your eyes, in the breadth of your mouth as in a beautiful happy day, which remains beautiful and happy, even when the head is sick and tired.

Everyone carries a room about inside him. This fact can even be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast and one pricks up one's ears and listens, say in the night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.

You must not pay too much attention to opinions. The written word is unalterable, and opinions are often only an expression of despair.

My condition is not unhappiness, but it is also not happiness, not indifference, not weakness, not fatigue, not another interest – so what is it then?

Self-control is something for which I do not strive. Self-control means wanting to be effective at some random point in the infinite radiations of my spiritual existence.

What do I have in common with Jews? I don't even have anything in common with myself.

Nor is it perhaps really love when I say that for me you are the most beloved; In this love you are like a knife, with which I explore myself.

If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it?

Writing is a deeper sleep than death. Just as one wouldn't pull a corpse from its grave, I can't be dragged from my desk at night.

I'm doing badly, I'm doing well; whichever you prefer.

Now the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence... someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence, certainly never.

There's no quiet place here on earth for our love, not in the village and not anywhere else, so I picture a grave, deep and narrow, in which we embrace as if clamped together, I bury my face against you, you yours against me, and no one will ever see us.

What a fate: to be condemned to work for a firm where the slightest negligence at once gave rise to the gravest suspicion! Were all the employees nothing but a bunch of scoundrels, was there not among them one single loyal devoted man who, had he wasted only an hour or so of the firm's time in the morning, was so tormented by conscience as to be driven out of his mind and actually incapable of leaving his bed?

Writing is prayer.

it is, after all, not necessary to fly right into the middle of the sun, but it is necessary to crawl to a clean little spot on Earth where the sun sometimes shines and one can warm oneself a little.

Si el libro que leemos no nos despierta de un puñetazo en el cráneo, ¿para qué leerlo?… Un libro tiene que ser un hacha que rompa el mar de hielo que llevamos dentro.

It seems to be a fact that man, tortured by his demons, avenges himself blindly on his fellow-man.

the blend of absurd, surreal and mundane which gave rise to the adjective kafkaesque

It is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary

I feel an unhappiness which almost dismembers me, and at the same time am convinced of its necessity

Like a dog! he said, it was as if the shame of it should outlive him.

And don't demand any sincerity from me, Milena. No one can demand it from me more than I myself and yet many things elude me, I'm sure, perhaps everything eludes me.

It would be very unjust to say that you deserted me, but that I was deserted, and sometimes terribly so, is true.