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The explorer thought to himself: It’s always a ticklish matter to intervene decisively in other people’s affairs. He was neither a member of the penal colony nor a citizen of the state to which it belonged. Were he to denounce this execution or actually try to stop it, they could say to him: You are a foreigner, mind your own business.

Yesterday the white horse appeared to me for the first time before I fell asleep; I have an impression of its first stepping out of my head, which was turned to the wall, jumping across me and down from the bed, and then disappearing.

I am more likely to achieve peace of mind through writing than the capacity to write through peace.

Sometimes he was overcome with a senseless fear and horror that his life would amount to nothing. Since he had become an adult and started earning his own bread, bleak and vapid walls had risen around him and blocked his view. All around, everywhere he looked, he saw dull and mundane convention.

"You will always love me. You will always wish you had stayed with me. You will always regret giving me up. If you lie with other women, a time will always come when you begin to wish she was me, and it will be me moving beneath you. You will wonder if you did what was right, and then one day you will realise that you didn't..."

Coitus as punishment for the happiness of being together. Live as ascetically as possible, more ascetically than a bachelor, that is the only possible way for me to endure marriage. But she?

I love you, Felice, with everything that is good in me as a human being, with everything in me that makes me deserving of being astir among the living. If it isn’t much, then I am not much.

At the risk of ruining your Sunday, I am sending you my most recent photograph, and three copies at that, since I think I have discovered in larger quantities it loses some of its horror.

Two opposite tendencies fought for supremacy in Kafka: the longing for loneliness, and the will to be sociable. But you don’t understand Kafka properly until you realize that the tendency to loneliness (which undeniably existed in him) he disapproved of, and it was life in the social community and significant work that meant the highest goal and ideal for him[.]

At the beginning of 1911, I made this note: On Sundays Kafka goes for walks by himself, without any objective, without thinking. He says, “Every day I wish myself off the earth.” “There is nothing wrong with me except myself.”

In how many talks did I not try and make clear to my friend—whose deepest wound, I knew, without yet having seen the diary, was just this—how he overestimated his father, and how stupid it is to despise oneself. It was all useless, the torrent of arguments that Kafka produced (when he didn’t prefer, as he frequently did, to keep quiet) could really shatter and repel me for a moment.

To my horror I found that my 'self' was composed of countless 'selves', each one lurking behind the other, each one seeming bigger and more taciturn than the one in front. The last ones disappeared in the shadows, beyond my comprehension.

Here fantasies were simply reality. The incredible thing was the way the same illusion would appear in several minds at once. The people talked themselves into believing the things they imagined.

My answer to the question, ‘What actually happens in the Dream Realm? What is life there like?’ would have to be silence. All I could tell you about would be the surface, but the very essence of Dream people is that they seek the depths. Everything is geared towards giving life the deepest possible spiritual dimension.

They travelled two days and two nights. Only now did Karl comprehend America’s great size.

He couldn't determine with certitude in which direction Newyork lay; on the way here he had paid too little attention to particulars, which could now have been useful to him. Finally he said to himself that after all he did not necessarily have to go to New-York where no one was waiting for him and one person in particular was certainly not waiting for him. So he chose a direction at random and started on his way.

Through the three windows of the room he saw the waves of the ocean [...] The little ships and boats — at least from the vantage point of the doorway — could only be observed in the distance as they darted by the score into the openings between the great ships. But behind all of this stood Newyork, looking at Karl with the hundred thousand windows of its skyscrapers.