More Quotes by Franz Kafka
You wouldn't believe the kind of person I could become if you wanted it.
He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived.
Do you realize that people don't know how to read Kafka simply because they want to decipher him? Instead of letting themselves be carried away by his unequaled imagination, they look for allegories — and come up with nothing but clichés: life is absurd (or it is not absurd), God is beyond reach (or within reach), etc. You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.
san otkriva stvarnost za kojom predstava zaostaje.strashno potiche od zhivota – potresno od umetnosti.
Yet even if I manage that, one single slip, and a slip cannot be avoided, will stop the whole process, easy and painful alike, and I will have to shrink back into my own circle again.
But what if all the tranquility, all the comfort, all the contentment were now to come to a horrifying end?
The books we need are of the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that makes us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, lost in a forest remote from all human habitation.
This brings me back to the image of Kafka standing before a fish in the Berlin aquarium, a fish on which his gaze fell in a newly found peace after he decided not to eat animals. Kafka recognized that fish as a member of his invisible family- not as his equal, of course, but as another being that was his concern.
Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it at every moment.
I carry the bars within me.
