Reader > Reader's Quotes

“Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”
― Franz Kafka

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

“Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.”
― Franz Kafka

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need 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 within us. That is my belief.”
― 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

“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.”
― Franz Kafka

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

“All language is but a poor translation.”
― Franz Kafka

“A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity."

[Letter to Max Brod, July 5, 1922]”
― Franz Kafka

“You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”
― Franz Kafka

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

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

“Books are a narcotic.”
― Franz Kafka

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

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.”
― Franz Kafka

“I miss you deeply, unfathomably, senselessly, terribly.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“I never wish to be easily defined. I’d rather float over other people’s minds as something strictly fluid and non-perceivable; more like a transparent, paradoxically iridescent creature rather than an actual person.”
― Franz Kafka

“Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.”
― Franz Kafka

“You are the knife I turn inside myself; that is love. That, my dear, is love.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

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