More Quotes by Franz Kafka
No writer in our time has been more isolated than Kafka, and yet few have achieved communication as well as he did.
He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived.
Having a trial like that means losing a trial like that (Sufrir un proceso es casi haberlo perdido)
Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it at every moment.
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
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.
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.
sleep is the most innocent creature there is and a sleepless man the most guilty.
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.
You wouldn't believe the kind of person I could become if you wanted it.
