phoebe > phoebe's Quotes

“Kill me, or you are a murderer.”
― Franz Kafka

“I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.”
― Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

“The meaning of life is that it stops.”
― Franz Kafka

“I have spent all my life resisting the desire to end it.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“A First Sign of the Beginning of Understanding is the Wish to Die.”
― Franz Kafka

“I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.”
― Franz Kafka

“Slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life.”
― franz kafka

“It's only because of their stupidity that they're able to be so sure of themselves.”
― Franz Kafka, The Trial

“He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived.”
― Franz Kafka

“I was ashamed of myself when I realised life was a costume party and I attended with my real face”
― Franz Kafka

“In man's struggle against the world, bet on the world.”
― Franz Kafka

“It would have been so pointless to kill himself that, even if he had wanted to, the pointlessness would have made him unable.”
― Franz Kafka, The Trial

“Evil is whatever distracts.”
― Franz Kafka

“It certainly was not my intention to make you suffer, yet i have done so; obviously it never will be my intention to make you suffer, yet I shall always do so.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice

“Should I be grateful or should I curse the fact that despite all misfortune I can still feel love, an unearthly love but still for earthly objects.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923

“He was a tool of the boss, without brains or backbone.”
― Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

“I feel an unhappiness which almost dismembers me, and at the same time am convinced of its necessity”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923

“You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Dear Jesus, do something.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“I was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“Don't touch me; I'll die if you touch me.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Listen: I am ideally happy. My happiness is a kind of challenge. As I wander along the streets and the squares and the paths by the canal, absently sensing the lips of dampness through my worn soles, I carry proudly my ineffable happiness. The centuries will roll by, and schoolboys will yawn over the history of our upheavals; everything will pass, but my happiness , dear, my happiness will remain,in the moist reflection of a street lamp, in the cautious bend of stone steps that descend into the canal's black waters, in the smiles of a dancing couple, in everything with which God so generously surrounds human loneliness.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Selected Letters, 1940-1977

“Because you took advantage of my disadvantage.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“And I still have other smothered memories, now unfolding themselves into limbless monsters of pain. Once, in a sunset-ending street of Beardsley, she turned to little Eva Rosen (I was taking both nymphets to a concert and walking behind them so close as almost to touch them with my person), she turned to Eva, and so very serenely and seriously, in answer to something the other had said about its being better to die than hear Milton Pinski; some local schoolboy she knew, talk about music, my Lolita remarked:
'You know what's so dreadful about dying is that you're completely on your own'; and it struck me, as my automaton knees went up and down, that I simply did not know a thing about my darling's mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile cliches, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate - dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and miserable convulsions...”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita