Quotes by Franz Kafka

“Love is a drama of contradictions.”

“The infinitesimal seedlings became a forest of trees that grew courteously, correcting the distances between themselves as they shaped themselves to the promptings of available light and moisture, ...”

“May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.”

“I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones. ...”

“Yours(now I'm even losing my name - it was getting shorter and shorter all the time and is now: Yours)”

“The meaning of life is that it stops.”

“I only fear danger where I want to fear it.”

“L'ternit, c'est long ... surtout vers la fin.”

“He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasnt yet lived.”

“All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else.”

“In general I lacked principally the ability to provide even in the slightest detail for the real future. I thought only of things in the present and their present condition, not because of thorough...”

“But Im not guilty, said K. theres been a mistake. How is it even possible for someone to be guilty? Were all human beings here, one like the other. That is true said the priest but that is how the ...”

“It's my side. I have found the pain. It is in my side, and I isolate it and define it, and arrange the other pains around it. I tell myself that pain is information, that I am learning to map the s...”

“I am too tired, I must try to rest and sleep, otherwise I am lost in every respect. What an effort to keep alive! Erecting a monument does not require an expenditure of so much strength.”

“From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back.”

“I long for you; I who usually longs without longing, as though I am unconscious and absorbed in neutrality and apathy, really, utterly long for every bit of you.”

“The hardest bones, containing the richest marrow, can be conquered only by a united crushing of all the teeth of all dogs. That of course is only a figure of speech and exaggerated; if all teeth we...”

“The truth is always an abyss. One must as in a swimming pool dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later rise again lau...”

“Was he a beast if music could move him so?”

“The Kafka paradox: art depends on truth, but truth, being indivisable, cannot know itself: to tell the truth is to lie. thus the writer is the truth, and yet when he speaks he lies.”