Un libro dev'essere un'ascia per il mare ghiacciato che è dentro di noi.

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sleep is the most innocent creature there is and a sleepless man the most guilty.

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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.

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But what if all the tranquility, all the comfort, all the contentment were now to come to a horrifying end?

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I carry the bars within me.

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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.

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You are the knife I turn inside myself; that is love. That, my dear, is love.

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He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived.

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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

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Every thing you love is very likely to be lost, but in the end, love will return in a different way.

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