Kafka's Other Trial Quotes

“...how could I, fool that I am, go on sitting in my office, or here at home, instead of leaping onto a train with my eyes shut and opening them only when I am with you?”
― Elias Canetti, Kafka's Other Trial: The Letters to Felice

“The trouble is, I am not at peace with myself; I am not always "something," and if for once I am "something," I pay for it by "being nothing" for months on end.'
—Kafka, quoted by Canetti”
― Elias Canetti, Kafka's Other Trial: The Letters to Felice

“The freedom to fail is preserved, as a sort of supreme law, which guarantees escape at every fresh juncture. One is inclined to call this the freedom of the weak person who seeks salvation in defeat. His true uniqueness, his special relation to power, is expressed in the prohibition of victory. All calculations originate and end in impotence.”
― Elias Canetti, Kafka's Other Trial: The Letters to Felice

“For him [Kafka], the most tormenting thing about his notion of marriage must have been its ruling out the possibility of one's ever becoming so small as to be able to vanish: one has to be there.”
― Elias Canetti, Kafka's Other Trial: The Letters to Felice

“Beni engelleyenin olgular olduğu pek söylenemez, bir korku, aşılabilmesi olanaksız bir korku var: mutlu olmaktan korkmak, daha yüce bir amaç için kendine acı verme tutkusu ve buyruğu.”
― Franz Kafka, Kafka's Other Trial: The Letters to Felice

“For a good part of his [Kafka's] work consists of tentative steps toward perpetually changing possibilities of future. He does not acknowledge a single future, there are many; this multiplicity of futures paralyzes him and burdens his step.”
― Elias Canetti, Kafka's Other Trial: The Letters to Felice

“There is, in Kafka, a sort of sleep-worship; he regards sleep as a panacea.”
― Elias Canetti, Kafka's Other Trial: The Letters to Felice

“It is not, however, only the word, it is also the thing, in all its infinite complexity, that he [Kafka] articulates with unrivaled courage and clarity. For, since he fears power in any form, since the real aim of his life is to withdraw from it, in whatever form it may appear, he detects it, identifies it, names it, and creates figures of it in every instance where others would accept it as being nothing out of the ordinary.”
― Elias Canetti, Kafka's Other Trial: The Letters to Felice

“Any life is laughable if one knows it well enough. It is something serious and terrible if one knows it even better.”
― Elias Canetti, Kafka's Other Trial: The Letters to Felice

“If anyone was ever cognizant of the need and function of 'litanies', it was Kafka.”
― Elias Canetti, Kafka's Other Trial: The Letters to Felice