Quotes About Kafka

In Czechoslovakia, we consider Kafka a very funny man. A humorist.

I am a very unhappy human being and you, dearest, simply had to be summoned to create an equilibrium for all this misery.

That, by the way, was Kafka's problem when it came to writing: he saw all the defects—his own and everyone else's.

When I think that Kafka loved this creature, dreamed about her, I am ashamed for man and his illusions.

Kafka believed in the golem, and even that the future might well bring another one.

Recently, a busload of us tourists crossing the border between Chile and Argentina had to wait an hour and a half while our documents were checked. Getting through the Berlin Wall was easier. Kafka was Chilean.

My health is only just good enough for myself alone, not good enough for marriage, let alone fatherhood. Yet when I read your letter, I feel I could overlook even what cannot possibly be overlooked.

Kafka saw both himself and Red Peter as hybrids, as monstrous thinking devices mounted inexplicably on suffering animal bodies.

The gate has a secret passcode. Sara has a secret passcode. She should. Andrew would stand there for years trying combinations. He wouldn't keep track or develop a strategy but just continue trying different combinations and then Kafka would rise from the grave and write a novel about him.

Kafkas DaÄŸlar?'nda bir kayaya zincirlenen Prometheus, her gece dev bir kartal taraf?ndan ziyaret edilir ve ciÄŸeri gagalanarak sökülüp al?n?rd?; Zeus ise her gün ciÄŸerini yeniler, böylece iÅŸkence asla son bulmazd?.

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.

In Hollywood, you still have wonderful actors, but it's so hard to work there. To work becomes a Kafka nightmare - it's the last communist country!

In the summer of 1913, Kafka bangs endlessly on about 'necessity,' that favorite concept of every German since Hegel who ever planned to do something morally dubious.

I yearn for the darkness. I pray for death. Real death. If I thought that in death I would meet the people I've known in life I don't know what I'd do. That would be the ultimate horror. The ultimate despair. If I had to meet my mother again and start all of that all over, only this time without the prospect of death to look forward to? Well. That would be the final nightmare. Kafka on wheels.

To do justice to the figure of Kafka it its purity and peculiar beauty one must never lose sight of one thing; it is the purity and beauty of failure. The circumstances of this failure are manifold. One is tempted to say: once he was certain of eventual failure, everything worked out for him en route as in a dream. There is nothing more memorable that the fervor with which Kafka emphasized his failure.

Even if Kafka did not pray—and this we do not know—he still possessed in the highest degree what Malebranche called the natural prayer of the soul: attentiveness. And in this attentiveness he included all living creatures, as saints include them in their prayers.

Since my first encounter with Kafka's writing, I've been interested in a quality that, while he was alive, stood in the way of his achieving a large reputation: his allegory.

I believe," he said, "in what I call the secret mainstream. Kafka was there too. Today, yes, we know Kafka was the voice of an overwhelming bureaucracy with a deep evil inside of it. Often we see these figures in the secret mainstream. I am one of them.

We live in an age which is so possessed by demons, that soon we shall only be able to do goodness and justice in the deepest secrecy, as if it were a crime.

JINGLE To show the fat brain rotting like stumps of brown teeth in an old bright throat is the final clever thrill of summer lads all dead with love. So here is mine, torn and stretched for the sun, to be used for a drum or a tambourine, to be scratched with poetry by Kafka's machine

No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.

The horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle: That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. —David Foster Wallace, "Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness" (2005)

It's not that students don't get Kafka's humor but that we've taught them to see humor as something you get-the same way we've taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle.

No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.