It's impossible to defend oneself in the absence of goodwill
It seems so dreadful to be a bachelor, to become an old man struggling to keep one's dignity while begging for an invitation whenever one wants to spend an evening in company, having to carry one's me...
It isn’t easy to understand exactly what she is saying, for one doesn’t know whether she is speaking ironically or seriously, it’s mostly serious, but sounds ironic. - Stop interpreting everything! sa...
It is truly no feat to crack a nut, and therefore no one would think to gather an audience for the purpose of entertaining them with nutcracking. But if he should do so, and if he should succeed in hi...
It is only our conception of time that makes us call the Last Judgment by this name. It is, in fact, a kind of martial law.
In the morning and in the evening and at night in his dreams, this street was filled with constantly bustling traffic, which seen from above seemed like a continually self-replenishing mixture of dist...
I was making for that city in the south of which it was said in our village:There you'll find queer folk! Just think, they never sleep!And why not?Because they never get tired.And why not?Because they...
I stand on the end platform of the tram and am completely unsure of my footing in this world, in this town, in my family. Not even casually could I indicate any claims that I might rightly advance in...
I read the letter once, put it aside, and read it again; I pick up a file but am really only reading your letter; I am with the typist, to whom I am supposed to dictate, and again your letter slowly s...
I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.
Fragen war die Hauptsache
For when one is about to embark on some enterprise, it is precisely the books whose contents have nothing at all in common with the enterprise that are the most useful.
All the people who try to torment me, and who have now occupied the entire space around me, will quite gradually be thrust back by the beneficent passage of these days, without my having to help them...
All he wanted to do now was to get up quietly and undisturbed, get dressed, and, most important, eat breakfast, and only then consider what to do next, because, as he was well aware, in bed he could n...
Writer speaks a stench.
I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.
The Kafka paradox: art depends on truth, but truth, being indivisable, cannot know itself: to tell the truth is to lie. thus the writer is the truth, and yet when he speaks he lies.
كتابة الرسائل .. تعني أن تعري نفسكَ أمام الأشباح ، و هو شيء لطالما كانوا ينتظرونه بفارغ الصبر. كتابة القُبل فيها لا يعني أنها ستصل إلى مكانها المقصود ، بينما على العكس ، يتخطفها الأشباح على طول الطريق...
There can be no more beautiful spot to die in, no spot more worthy of total despair, than one’s own novel.
The man from the country has not expected such difficulties; the law, he thinks, should be accessible to everyone and at all times; but as he now takes a closer look at the doorkeeper in his fur coat,...