The Diaries of Franz Kafka Quotes

“In the past I couldn’t manage to express myself freely with new acquaintances because the presence of sexual desires unconsciously hindered me, now I’m hindered by their conscious absence.”
― Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka

“This morning for the first time in a long while the pleasure again in imagining a knife twisted in my heart.”
― Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka

“But I of all people feel my depths far too often and far too strongly to be able to be even halfway content. And I need only feel these depths uninterruptedly for fifteen minutes, the poisonous world will flow into my mouth like water into the drowning man.”
― Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka

“It is no refutation of the presentiment of a final liberation if the next day the imprisonment remains unchanged or even grows more severe or even if it is explicitly declared that it shall never cease. Rather, all this can be a necessary prerequisite of the final liberation.”
― Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka

“I just wanted to say, the fact that I know you well doesn't protect me much, it only relieves you of the effort of telling me lies.”
― Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka

“(shyness, modesty, anxiousness are considered noble and good, because they offer little resistance to one’s own expansive impulses)”
― Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka

“What do I have in common with Jews? I have scarcely anything in common with myself and should stand completely silent in a corner, content that I can breathe.”
― Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka

“There was a dull knock at the door. “Come in, come in, all that is outside!” he cried”
― Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka

“I had locks on my whole body as at a costume ball and at brief intervals now here now there a lock was opened or closed.”
― Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka

“Yesterday at the factory. The girls in their clothes that are in themselves unbearably dirty and ragged, with their hair disheveled as if they had just woken up, with their facial expression fixed by the incessant noise of the transmissions and by the individual machine, which, though automatic, halts unpredictably, are not human beings, one doesn’t greet them, one doesn’t apologize when one jostles them, if one summons them for a small task, then they carry it out but immediately return to the machine, with a head movement one shows them where they are needed, they stand there in underskirts, they’re at the mercy of the slightest power and don’t even have enough calm understanding to recognize and propitiate this power with glances and bows. But when it’s six o’clock and they shout it to each other, when they untie the scarves from their necks and hair, when they dust themselves off with a brush that is passed around the hall and is shouted for by impatient ones, when they pull the skirts over their heads and when they clean their hands as well as possible, then they are, in the end, women after all, can smile despite pallor and bad teeth, shake their stiffened bodies, one can no longer jostle them, stare at them or overlook them, one squeezes oneself against the greasy crates to clear the way for them, keeps one’s hat in one’s hand when they say good evening and doesn’t know how to take it when one of them holds our winter coat for us to put on.”
― Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka

“When I was lying on the sofa and there was loud talking in the rooms on both sides of me, on the left only by women, on the right more by men, I had the impression that they are crude Negro-like unappeasable beings, who don’t know what they’re saying and only talk to make the air move, who lift their faces while talking and gaze after the words they speak.”
― Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka

“Her large mouth moved so close in front of me in surprising but natural shapes.”
― Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka

“I’m unpunctual, because I don’t feel the pains of waiting. I wait like a cow. For when I feel a purpose, even if a very uncertain one, of my momentary existence, I’m so vain in my weakness that, once this purpose has been set before me, I will gladly tolerate anything for its sake. If I were in love, what I could do then. How long I waited years ago under the arcades on the Ring until M.[380] came by and even if she only passed by with her lover.”
― Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka

“Sand: The French are all actors; but only the weakest among them act in the theater[”
― Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka

“When I really asked myself a question, I still responded, here there was still something to be wrested from me, from this heap of straw that I have been for five months and whose fate, it seems, is to be set alight in the summer and to burn away before the spectator can blink. If only that would happen to me! And it should happen to me ten times over, for I don’t even regret the unhappy time. My condition is not unhappiness, but it’s not happiness either, not indifference not weakness, not fatigue, not interest in anything else, so what is it then? The fact that I don’t know is probably connected with my inability to write. And this is something I think I understand without knowing its cause. For whatever things occur to me occur not from the root, but beginning somewhere toward their middle. Just let someone try to hold them, let someone try to hold and cling to a blade of grass that only starts growing from the middle. Perhaps some can, Japanese acrobats, for example, who climb a ladder that isn’t resting on the ground but on the upturned soles of a partner lying on his back and isn’t leaning against a wall but goes straight up into the air.[ 5] This is more than I can manage, not to mention the fact that my ladder doesn’t have even those soles at its disposal. That’s not all, of course, and such a question still isn’t enough to make me speak. But each day at least one line should be pointed at me as people are now pointing telescopes at the comet.[ 6] And if I would then appear once before that sentence, lured by that sentence, as I was last Christmas, for example, when I had gone so far that I could only barely contain myself and when I really seemed to be on the last rung of my ladder, which, however, stood steadily on the ground and against the wall. But what a ground! what a wall! And yet that ladder didn’t fall, so firmly did my feet press it against the ground, so firmly did my feet raise it against the wall. Today, for example, I committed three impertinences, toward a conductor, toward a superior of mine, well there were only 2, but they’re plaguing me like stomach pains. Coming from anyone they would have been impertinences, all the more so coming from me. Thus I went outside myself, fought in the air in the mist and worst of all no one noticed that I committed, had to commit, the impertinence as an impertinence toward my companions too, had to bear the right expression, the responsibility; but the most awful thing was when one of my acquaintances took this impertinence not as a sign of a certain character but as the character itself, called my attention to my impertinence and admired it. Why don’t I stay within myself? To be sure, I now tell myself: look, the world lets you strike it, the conductor and your superior remained calm as you left, the latter even said goodbye. But that means nothing. You can attain nothing when you abandon yourself, but what do you miss anyhow in your circle. To this speech I respond only: I too would rather receive a beating within the circle than myself give a beating outside it, but where the devil is this circle? For a while I did see it lying on the earth, as if sprayed there with lime, but now it just hovers around me, indeed doesn’t even hover.”
― Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka

“When I really asked myself a question, I still responded, here there was still something to be wrested from me, from this heap of straw that I have been for five months and whose fate, it seems, is to be set alight in the summer and to burn away before the spectator can blink.”
― Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka

“There’s no doubt that a main obstacle to my progress is my physical condition. With such a body nothing can be achieved. I will have to get used to its perpetual failure. From the last few wildly dreamed-through but barely even snatchily slept-through nights I was so incoherent this morning, felt nothing but my forehead, saw a halfway bearable condition only far beyond the present one and in sheer readiness for death at one point would have liked to curl up with the documents in my hand on the cement tiles of the corridor. My body is too long for its weakness, it has not the least fat to generate a blessed warmth, to preserve inner fire, no fat on which the spirit might at some point nourish itself beyond its daily need without damage to the whole. How is the weak heart, which recently has often stabbed me, supposed to push the blood down the whole length of these legs. To the knee would be enough work, but then it is washed with only decrepit strength into the cold lower legs. But now it is already needed again up above, one waits for it while it dissipates down below. Due to the length of the body everything is pulled apart. What can it accomplish then, when perhaps even if it were compressed, it wouldn’t have enough strength for what I want to achieve.”
― Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka