More Quotes by Franz Kafka
You are the knife I turn inside myself; that is love. That, my dear, is love.
Every thing you love is very likely to be lost, but in the end, love will return in a different way.
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.
But sleep? On a night like this? What an idea! Just think of how many thoughts a blanket smothers while one lies alone in bed, and how many unhappy dreams it keeps warm.
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
You wouldn't believe the kind of person I could become if you wanted it.
Having a trial like that means losing a trial like that (Sufrir un proceso es casi haberlo perdido)
sleep is the most innocent creature there is and a sleepless man the most guilty.
No writer in our time has been more isolated than Kafka, and yet few have achieved communication as well as he did.
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.