Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors Quotes

“I don't feel particularly proud of myself. But when I walk alone in the woods or lie in the meadows, all is well.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for?”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? (...) We need the 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 inside us.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors

“After tormenting myself for a long time, I am stopping. I am unable and in the near future will scarcely be able to complete the remaining pieces.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors

“During last night’s insomnia, as these thoughts came and went between my aching temples, I realised once again, what I had almost forgotten in this recent period of relative calm, that I tread a terribly tenuous, indeed almost non-existent soil spread over a pit full of shadows, whence the powers of darkness emerge at will to destroy my life…”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors

“The amount of quiet I need does not exist in the world, from which it follows that no one ought to need so much quiet.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors

“That is a very poor career, but only a poor career give the world the light that an imperfect, but pretty good writer wants to generate--at all costs, unfotunately.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors

“Sometimes it's as though I were a gladiator in training. He doesn't know what they have in store for him, but to judge by the training he is being put through, it may be a great battle with all of Rome looking on.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors

“Whatever it’s actually been, I felt declassed; people who have not lazed away at least part of their time up to their twenty-fifth year are greatly to be pitied, for it’s my belief that it’s not the money you have earned that you take with you into your grave, but your idle time.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors

“Forgive me for not having answered you right off, but I still have not developed the technique for making good use of my few hours; midnight comes apace, as now.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors

“So if I do not write, that is due chiefly to "strategic" reasons such as have become dominant for me in recent years. I do not trust words and letters, my words and letters; I want to share my heart with people but not with phantoms that play with the words and read the letters with slavering tongue...It sometimes seems to me that the nature of art in general, the existence of art, is explicable solely in terms of such "strategic considerations," of making possible the exchange of truthful words from person to person.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors

“At the moment there is nothing definite to say about the question or about me. 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”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors

“I don’t complain about the work so much as about the sluggishness of swampy time. The office hours, you see, cannot be divided up; even in the last half hour I feel the pressure of the eight hours just as much as in the first. Often it is like a train ride lasting night and day, until in the end you’re totally crushed; you no longer think about the straining of the engine, or about the hilly or flat countryside, but ascribe all that’s happening to your watch alone, which you continually hold in your palm.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors

“Rage is something a child has when his house of cards collapses because a grown-up has shaken the table. But the house of cards didn't collapse because the table was shaken, but because it was a house of cards. A real house doesn't collapse even if the table is chopped into firewood; it doesn't need a foundation from somewhere outside.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors

“It may be possible, I would not know, for a man who has conquered chaos to begin to write; those will be holy books. Or begin to love; that will be love, not fear of chaos...Not until the world has been ordered does the writer begin.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors

“When we write something, we have not coughed up the moon, whose origins might then be investigated. Rather, we have moved to the moon with everything we have. Nothing has changed; there, we are what we were here. A thousand differences are possible in the tempo of the voyage, none in the fact itself.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors

“God doesn't want me to write, but I - I must. So there's an everlasting up and down; after all, God is the stronger, and there's more anguish in it than you can imagine.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors

“But when I walk alone in the woods or lie in the meadows, all is well.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors

“After tormenting myself for a long time, i am stopping”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors

“But above all, the center of all the misery remains. I cannot write; I have not done a line I respect; on the other hand, I have excised everything I wrote after Paris—it wasn’t much! My whole body warns me against every word; every word, before it lets me write it down, first looks around in all directions. The sentences literally crumble before me; I see their insides and then have to stop quickly.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors