Franz Kafka Quotes

“I long for you; I who usually longs without longing, as though I am unconscious and absorbed in neutrality and apathy, really, utterly long for every bit of you.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it at every moment.”
― Franz Kafka

“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.”
― Franz Kafka

“Self-control is something for which I do not strive. Self-control means wanting to be effective at some random point in the infinite radiations of my spiritual existence.”
― Franz Kafka

“I see, these books are probably law books, and it is an essential part of the justice dispensed here that you should be condemned not only in innocence but also in ignorance.”
― Franz Kafka, The Trial

“I have no literary interests; I am made of literature. I am nothing else and cannot be anything else.”
― Franz Kafka

“He was shy, timid, gentle, and kind, but he wrote gruesome and painful books. He saw the world as full of invisible demons, who tear apart and destroy defenseless people. He was too clear-sighted and too wise to be able to live; he was too weak to fight, he had that weakness of noble, beautiful people who are not able to do battle against the fear of misunderstandings, unkindness, or intellectual lies. Such persons know beforehand that they are powerless and go down in defeat in such a way that they shame the victor. He knew people as only people of great sensitivity are able to know them, as somebody who is alone and sees people almost prophetically, from one flash of a face. He knew the world in a deep and extraordinary manner. He was himself a deep and extraordinary world.”
― Milena Jesenska

“When I am not reading Kafka I am thinking about Kafka. When I am not thinking about Kafka I miss thinking about him. Having missed thinking about him for a while, I take him out and read him again. That’s how it works.”
― László Krasznahorkai

“If I didn't have my parents to think about I'd have given in my notice a long time ago, I'd have gone up to the boss and told him just what I think, tell him everything I would, let him know just what I feel. He'd fall right off his desk! And it's a funny sort of business to be sitting up there at your desk, talking down at your subordinates from up there, especially when you have to go right up close because the boss is hard of hearing.”
― Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

“A tortured man but a marvellous writer, complex and yet also entirely simple. As I always say, one is never too young to be reading Kafka, and never too old to be reading him differently.”
― Panayotis Cacoyannis, The Madness of Grief

“I don't need any proofs for you; there is nothing in my mind as clear and certain as you....”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“And I close my eyes to gaze into those depths, and am almost engulfed in you.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“The three of them knew it. She was Kafka’s mistress. Kafka had dreamt her. The three of them knew it. He was Kafka’s friend. Kafka had dreamt him. The three of them knew it. The woman said to the friend, Tonight I want you to have me. The three of them knew it. The man replied: If we sin, Kafka will stop dreaming us. One of them knew it. There was no longer anyone on earth. Kafka said to himself Now the two of them have gone, I’m left alone. I’ll stop dreaming myself.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“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.”
― Franz Kafka

“it's impossible to understand how my breast could expand and contract to breathe this air, it's impossible to understand how you can be far away.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“An und für sich ist uns das Lachen immer nah; trotz allem Jammer unseres Lebens ist ein leises Lachen bei uns gewissermaßen immer zu Hause.”
― Franz Kafka, Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk

“Rather like "Orwellian", the term "Kafkaesque" has come to be used, often enough by those who have not read a word of Kafka, to describe what are perceived as typically or even uniquely modern traumas: existential alienation, isolation and insecurity, the labyrinth of state bureaucracy, the corrupt or whimsical abuse of totalitarian power, the impenetrable tangle of legal systems, the knock on the door in the middle of the night….”
― John R. Williams, The Metamorphosis and Other Stories

“All things now arrive in sequence, always one after the other, like evidence arranged against me. I wake, endure, but only because my eyes open. I've talked to myself, and we've made up my mind: we no longer long for tomorrow; today is enough. Survival has begun to impersonate living, yet it alone is not enough to convince what's inside my head to persuade me into believing I belong anywhere. What should be ordinary is nothing else but negotiated for a price I cannot purchase. So I starve most of the time. Hunger is routine; three days a week would pass in absence, a fourth demands and protests. My thoughts remain organized, which is what troubles me most: I cannot tell whether this is existence or merely maintenance, because I'm sure it isn't living—proof, perhaps, that I shouldn't be alive. I know for a fact that the world no longer expects me in it, and I answer in kind because I refused it first. But I am still here, unsure how to undo it—not even inside my life, but confined to a continuation of its own removal proceedings.”
― Samuel Martínez Roque

“At this point, almost against his will, he looked at the face of the corpse. It was as it had been in his life. He could discover no sign of the promised transfiguration. What all the others had found in the machine, the Officer had not. His lips were pressed firmly together, his eyes were open and looked as they had when he was alive, his gaze was calm and convinced. The tip of a large iron needle had gone through his forehead.”
― Franz Kafka, In the Penal Colony

“Sometimes, people leave because things don't work, and sometimes they leave because they found someone.”
― Wajid Shaikh, Sukoon

“It's a bitch, isn't it? It doesn't leave you alone. You see it everywhere. It haunts you; it follows. It doesn't stay out of your dreams, so you have to teach yourself how to pass away with your eyes open because even sleep won't take it from you. Then you think, because its pace is slow, you have a chance of running, and you run. But when you turn around to see, you realize it doesn’t need to chase you because it is already there, waiting at the next place before you even arrive. And you don't know it will be brief the illusion of relief, so thin and fragile, and so quiet. Then it breaks out—not loudly, but inevitably—in between the pauses of your thoughts where you hoped there would be nothing, so you have to keep on thinking so it doesn't show up, uninvited but expected. A memory shaped less like an image and more like a knowing, like understanding: if you run, it'll come along, but if you pause, you'll understand there's no escape because you cannot relocate the thought within the space inside your head. Oh shit, you cannot run away from it because it's been yourself. Don't you see? It's you who always follows. You wait for it as if you knew you'd come along because you always do. Then you have to sit with it, hear it talk about the shit you've said and done, and then you'll get to understand why you're alone; and either bring yourself to run again, to be the one who always follows, or walk beside yourself and come along, befriend the pain, and hold its hand, not letting go through every hollow.”
― Samuel Martínez Roque

“The father himself didn't follow his own criticisms and rules too strictly, and this very lack of logic appears to the son, on looking back, as a sign of unruly zest for life and unbreakable will-power. 'You had worked yourself up to such a position by your own strength, that you had unlimited confidence in your own opinion...From your armchair you ruled the world. Your opinion was right, everybody else was mad, eccentric, meshuggah, not normal. At the same time your self-confidence was so great that there was no need for you to be consistent, and yet you were always right...”
― Max Brod, Franz Kafka

“He asked me several things, but I couldn't answer, indeed I didn't even understand his questions. So I said: "Perhaps you are sorry now that you invited me, so I'd better go," and I was about to get up. But he stretched his hand out over the table and pressed me down. "Stay," he said, "that was only a test. He who does not answer the questions has passed the test.”
― Franz Kafka, Parables and Paradoxes

“Outsider artists like Poe, Van Gogh, and Kafka had so much to say—yet no one to say it to. Their voices were soft, uncertain, lost in the noise of their own era. Only now are they truly heard—at last, and loud, and with a clarity that shakes the very ground beneath us. Not just posthumously, but long after their generations have vanished into dust. Their deaths were not only personal losses, but warnings—so stark and so human, they’ve placed the entire species on the endangered list.”
― Jason Daniel Chaplin

“And perhaps he had made no mistake at all, his name really was called, it having been the teacher's intention to make the rewarding of the best student at the same time a punishment for the worst one.”
― Franz Kafka, Parables and Paradoxes

“If they could and if they dared, they would long ago have enticed the animal to come yet closer to them, so that they might be more frightened than ever. But in reality the animal is not at all eager to approach them, as long as it is left alone it takes just as little notice of them as of the men, and probably what it would like best would be to remain in the hiding place where it lives in the periods between the services, evidently in some hole in the wall that we have not yet discovered.”
― Franz Kafka, Parables and Paradoxes

“Poseidon sat at his desk, doing figures. The administration of all the waters gave him endless work. [...] It cannot be said that he enjoyed his work; he did it only because it had been assigned to him; in fact, he had already filed many petitions for--as he put it--more cheerful work, but every time the offer of something different was made to him it turned out that nothing suited him quite as well as his present position.”
― Franz Kafka, Parables and Paradoxes

“I ran past the first watchman. Then I was horrified, ran back and said to the watchman: "I ran through here while you were looking the other way." The watchman gazed ahead of him and said nothing. "I suppose I really oughtn't to have done it," I said. The watchman still said nothing. "Does your silence indicate permission to pass?”
― Franz Kafka, Parables and Paradoxes

“Kill me, or else you are a murderer" - Franz Kafka”
― Franz Kafka

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