Stanton Hager > Stanton's Quotes

“I am a cage, in search of a bird.”
― Franz Kafka

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

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

“Paths are made by walking”
― Franz Kafka

“I usually solve problems by letting them devour me.”
― Franz Kafka

“I do not speak as I think, I do not think as I should, and so it all goes on in helpless darkness.”
― Franz Kafka

“This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me.”
― Kafka Franz, Diaries, 1910-1923

“Beyond a certain point there is no return. This point has to be reached.”
― Franz Kafka

“We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.”
― Franz Kafka

“The truth is always an abyss. One must — as in a swimming pool — dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later rise again — laughing and fighting for breath — to the now doubly illuminated surface of things.”
― Franz Kafka

“All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else.”
― Franz Kafka

“We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.”
― Franz Kafka

“I am not well; I could have built the Pyramids with the effort it takes me to cling on to life and reason.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice

“Forget everything. Open the windows. Clear the room. The wind blows through it. You see only its emptiness, you search in every corner and don’t find yourself.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923

“Being alone has a power over me that never fails. My interior dissolves (for the time being only superficially) and is ready to release what lies deeper. When I am willfully alone, a slight ordering of my interior begins to take place and I need nothing more.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923

“Everyone carries a room about inside him. This fact can even be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast and one pricks up one’s ears and listens, say in the night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.”
― Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks

“If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it?”
― Franz Kafka

“Now the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence... someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence, certainly never.”
― Franz Kafka

“Writing is prayer.”
― Franz Kafka

“If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skulls, then why do we read it? Good God, we also would be happy if we had no books and such books that make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. What we must have are those books that come on us like ill fortune, like the death of one we love better than ourselves, like suicide. A book must be an ice axe to break the sea frozen inside us.
What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.”
― Franz Kafka

“Every word first looks around in every direction before letting itself be written down by me.”
― Franz Kafka

“Before he dies, all his experiences in these long years gather themselves in his head to one point, a ques-tion he has not yet asked the doorkeeper. He waves him nearer, since he can no longer raise his stiffening body. The doorkeeper has to bend low towards him, for the difference in height between them has altered much to the man's disadvantage. "What do you want to know now?" asks the doorkeeper; "you are insati-able." "Everyone strives to reach the Law," says the man, "so how does it happen that for all these many years no one but myself has ever begged for admit-tance?" The doorkeeper recognizes that the man has reached his end, and to let his failing senses catch the words roars in his ear: "No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you. I am now going to shut it.”
― Franz Kafka, The Trial

“I'm a cage, in search of a bird.”
― Franz Kafka

“Wherever there is water there is someone drowning.”
― Robert Bly, The Night Abraham Called to the Stars: Poems

“The inner boy in a messed-up family may keep on being shamed, invaded, disappointed, and paralyzed for years and years. "I am a victim," he says, over and over; and he is. But that very identification with victimhood keeps the soul house open and available for still more invasions. Most American men today do not have enough awakened or living warriors inside to defend their soul houses. And most people, men or women, do not know what genuine outward or inward warriors would look like, or feel like.”
― Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book About Men

“like a note of music, you are about to become nothing”
― Robert Bly, My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy: Poems – Intimate Ghazals of Startling Beauty, Wildness, and Astounding Energy

“Finding the Father

My friend, this body offers to carry us for nothing– as the ocean carries logs. So on some days the body wails with its great energy; it smashes up the boulders, lifting small crabs, that flow around the sides.

Someone knocks on the door. We do not have time to dress. He wants us to go with him through the blowing and rainy streets, to the dark house.

We will go there, the body says, and there find the father whom we have never met, who wandered out in a snowstorm the night we were born, and who then lost his memory, and has lived since longing for his child, whom he saw only once… while he worked as a shoemaker, as a cattle herder in Australia, as a restaurant cook who painted at night.

When you light the lamp you will see him. He sits there behind the door… the eyebrows so heavy, the forehead so light… lonely in his whole body, waiting for you.”
― Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book About Men

“Something in the adolescent male wants risk, courts danger, goes out to the edge – even to the edge of death.”
― Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book About Men

“Every part of our personality that we do not love will become hostile to us.”
― Robert Bly, A Little Book on the Human Shadow: A Poetic Journey into the Dark Side of the Human Personality, Shadow Work, and the Importance of Confronting Our Hidden Self

“We did not come to remain whole. We came to lose our leaves like the trees, Trees that start again, Drawing up from the great roots.”
― Robert Bly, Eating the Honey of Words: New and Selected Poems – Five Decades of Powerful American Poetry with Timeless Classics