Khing

“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

“It is not you in particular that I distrust, but the whole of humanity.”
― Natsume Sōseki, Kokoro

“All of us, more or less, wear masks. Because without masks we can’t survive in this violent world. Beneath an evil-spirit mask lies the natural face of an angel, beneath an angel’s mask lies the face of an evil spirit. It’s impossible to have just one or the other. That’s who we are. And that’s Carnaval. Schumann was able to see the many faces of humanity—the masks and the real faces—because he himself was a deeply divided soul, a person who lived in the stifling gap in between the two.”
― Haruki Murakami, First Person Singular: Stories

“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