Kafka Death Quotes

#1. He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn't yet lived.

Franz Kafka

#2. Nothing expresses Kafka's innermost sense of self more profoundly than his lapidary definition of "writing as a form of prayer": he was a writer. Not a man who wrote, but one to whom writing was the only form of being, the only means of defying death in life.

Ernst Pawel

#3. Of course he was there, a removed audience
of my redemption songs from beyond the grave,
the way Kafka and his father continued to shadow-box,
long after they quit staring at each other
at the dinner table.

Thabo Jijana

#4. I dreamt that Earth was finished. And the only
human being to contemplate the end was Franz
Kafka. In heaven, the Titans were fighting to the
death. From a wrought-iron seat in Central Park,
Kafka was watching the world burn.

Roberto Bolano

#5. If a man without a woman, as it says in a passage in the Talmud dear to the heart of Kafka, is not a man, then it is Amshel who became a man, even though on the point of death, but it is Franz who narrates this odyssey and teaches us how to become Amshel, how to become a man.

Claudio Magris

#6. The books we need are of the kind that act upon us like a misfortune,that makes us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide,lost in a forest remote from all human habitation

Franz Kafka

#7. Death might appear to destroy the meaning in our lives, but in fact it is the very source of our creativity. As Kafka said, "The meaning of life is that it ends." Death is the engine that keeps us running, giving us the motivation to achieve, learn, love, and create.

Caitlin Doughty

#8. We're all vanishing organisms and disappearing creatures in space and time - that death sentence in space in time that Kafka talked about with such profundity.

Cornel West

#9. But what if all the tranquility, all the comfort, all the contentment were now to come to a horrifying end?

Franz Kafka

#10. The moment Kafka attracts more attenetion than Joseph K., Kafka's posthumous death begins.

Milan Kundera

#11. It was being published, even after his death, that brought Franz Kafka alive: otherwise he would have been just a man who got nowhere with women.

Clive James

#12. A week later he was in Tokyo, his face reflected in an elevator's gold-veined mirror for this three-floor ascent of the aggressively nondescript O My Golly Building. To be admitted to Death Cube K, apparently a Franz Kafka theme bar.

William Gibson