Top 100 Kafka's Quotes
#1. With the rain falling
surgically against the roof,
I ate a dish of ice cream
that looked like Kafka's hat.
It was a dish of ice cream
tasting like an operating table
with the patient staring
up at the ceiling.
Richard Brautigan
#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. In Kafka's story "Wedding Preparations in the Country," Edward Raban fantasizes about splitting into two forms: one, to remain in bed all day, dreaming; the other, to go forth and conduct the business of the world.
Franz Kafka
#4. The horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle: That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.
- David Foster Wallace, "Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness" (2005)
David Foster Wallace
#5. He who has read Kafka's Metamorphosis and can look into his mirror unflinching may technically be able to read print, but is illiterate in the only sense that matters.
George Steiner
#6. Whoever utters 'Kafkaesque' has neither fathomed nor intuited nor felt the impress of Kafka's devisings. If there is one imperative that ought to accompany any biographical or critical approach, it is that Kafka is not to be mistaken for the Kafkaesque.
Cynthia Ozick
#7. Since my first encounter with Kafka's writing, I've been interested in a quality that, while he was alive, stood in the way of his achieving a large reputation: his allegory.
John Kessel
#8. It is not Kafka's fault that his wonderful writings have lately turned into a fad, and are read by people who have neither the ability nor the desire to absorb literature.
Herman Hesse
#9. Your self esteem is like a notch below Kafka's.
Woody Allen
#10. Kafka's evocations are, rather, unconscious and almost sub-archetypal, the little-kid stuff from which myths derive; this is why we tend to call even his weirdest stories nightmarish rather than surreal.
David Foster Wallace
#11. If anything, his parables guarantee the failure not only of his characters, but of readers wishing to abstract any lessons applicable to their own lives. Failure, it seems, is Kafka's true subject.
Franz Kafka
#12. I was first introduced to Kafka's writing during my compulsory army-service basic training. During that period, Kafka's fiction felt hyperrealistic.
Etgar Keret
#13. Kafka's inevitable tropism for the allegorical puts him in marked opposition to the realism that dominated the literary world of the first half of the 20th century.
John Kessel
#14. The moment Kafka attracts more attenetion than Joseph K., Kafka's posthumous death begins.
Milan Kundera
#15. Kafka's fiction examines a universe largely unexplored in the literature preceding him, one full of implications that venture into the remote regions of human psychology. It's a universe with different rules than those governing our reality. And there's no map.
Franz Kafka
#16. Just as Josef K, the protagonist of Kafka's 'The Trial,' awoke one day to discover that he had become part of some unfathomable legal carnival, we, too are frequently waking to discover that the rules of the digital game have once again profoundly changed.
Evgeny Morozov
#17. According to Beckett's or Kafka's law, there is immobility beyond movement: beyond standing up, there is sitting down, and beyond sitting down, lying down, beyond which one finally dissipates.
Gilles Deleuze
#18. As told by Kafka's close friend Max Brod:
"Suddenly he began to speak to the fish in their illuminated tanks. 'Now at least I can look at you in peace, I don't eat you anymore.' It was the time he turned strictly vegetarian.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#19. I ought to be able to invent words capable of blowing the odor of corpses in a direction other than straight into mine and the reader's face.
Franz Kafka
#20. My life was sweeter than other people's and my death will be more terrible by the same degree.
Franz Kafka
#21. True undoubting is the teacher's part, continual undoubting the part of the pupil.
Franz Kafka
#22. Look at this, Willem, he admits he doesn't know the law and at the same time insists he's innocent.
Franz Kafka
#23. Every single day, each time I see her face, see her, it's utterly precious.
Haruki Murakami
#24. I felt so weak and unhappy that I buried my face in the ground: I could not bear the strain of seeing around me the things of the earth. I felt convinced that every movement and every thought was forced, and that one had to be on one's guard against them.
Franz Kafka
#25. Photography concentrates one's eye on the superficial. For that reason it obscures the hidden life which glimmers through the outlines of things like a play of light and shade. One can't catch that even with the sharpest lens.
Franz Kafka
#26. But thing in the past are like plate that's shattered to pieces. You can never put it back together like it was, right?
Haruki Murakami
#27. She tells everyone she's an introvert." Cordelia sniffed. "It's a sad, psychological malady. Comes from reading way too much Kafka.
Ellen Hart
#28. In the struggle between yourself and the world, hold the world's coat.
Franz Kafka
#29. In Hollywood, you still have wonderful actors, but it's so hard to work there. To work becomes a Kafka nightmare - it's the last communist country!
Gerard Depardieu
#30. I would really hate it if I could call up Kafka or Hemingway or Salinger and any question I could throw at them they would have an answer. That's the magic when you read or hear something wonderful - there's no one that has all the answers.
Regina Spektor
#31. As far as I have seen, at school ... they aimed at blotting out one's individuality.
Franz Kafka
#32. I know. It's easy to forget things you don't need anymore."
Excerpt From: Haruki Murakami. "Kafka on the Shore." iBooks.
Haruki Murakami
#33. Don Quixote's misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza.
Franz Kafka
#34. Some books seem like a key to unfamiliar rooms in one's own castle.
Franz Kafka
#35. It's often better to be in chains than to be free.
Franz Kafka
#36. Things change every day, Mr Nakata. With each new dawn it's not the same world as the day before. And you're not the same person you were, either.
Haruki Murakami
#37. The main thing, when a sword cuts into one's soul, is to keep a calm gaze, lose no blood, accept the coldness of the sword with the coldness of a stone. By means of the stab, after the stab, become invulnerable.
Franz Kafka
#38. Life's splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come.
Franz Kafka
#39. If you have to deal with our friends at ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, it's like a Kafka novel. Files just disappear.
Jeb Bush
#40. Franz's domineering father expected his son to take up a profitable business career that would ensure social advancement for the family, as well as a successful marriage promising the same.
Franz Kafka
#41. I don't think anybody says to Coetzee or Dostoyevsky or Kafka, "Your characters aren't likeable." It's not about your character winning a popularity contest. That's not the writer's job.
Lynne Tillman
#42. It's sometimes quite astonishing that a single, average life is enough to encompass so much that it's at all possible ever to have any success in one's work here.
Franz Kafka
#43. In man's struggle against the world, bet on the world.
Franz Kafka
#44. I am forever fettered to myself [ ... ] and that's what I must try to live with.
Franz Kafka
#45. And so gentlemen, I learned. Oh, if you have to learn, you learn; if you're desperate for a way out, you learn; you learn pitilessly. You stand over yourself with a whip in your hand; if there's the least resistance, you lash yourself.
Franz Kafka
#46. If you look at the literature of the 19th century, you get things like Kafka and Dostoevsky, who basically write about feeling bored and alienated. That's because we lost contact with the important things in life like work that you enjoy, or the garden, nature, your family and friends.
Tom Hodgkinson
#47. The relationship to one's fellow man is the relationship of prayer, the relationship to oneself is the relationship of striving; it is from prayer that one draws the strength for one's striving.
Franz Kafka
#48. It isn't easy to understand exactly what she is saying, for one doesn't know whether she is speaking ironically or seriously, it's mostly serious, but sounds ironic. - "Stop interpreting everything!" said K.
Franz Kafka
#49. There's no quiet place here on earth for our love, not in the village and not anywhere else, so I picture a grave, deep and narrow, in which we embrace as if clamped together, I bury my face against you, you yours against me, and no one will ever see us.
Franz Kafka
#50. Perhaps most people in the world aren't trying to be free, Kafka. They just think they are. It's all an illusion. If they really were set free, most people would be in a real pickle. You'd better remember that. People actually prefer not being free?
Haruki Murakami
#51. This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me.
Franz Kafka
#52. Way
as her hands reached to the back of his father's head and she begged him to spare Gregor's life.
Franz Kafka
#53. The animal wrests the whip from its master and whips itself in order to become master, not knowing that this is only a fantasy produced by a new knot in the master's whiplash.
Franz Kafka
#54. Each of us has his own way of emerging from the underworld, mine is by writing. That's why the only way I can keep going, if at all, is by writing, not through rest and sleep. I am far more likely to achieve peace of mind through writing than the capacity to write through peace.
Franz Kafka
#55. like anyone bringing up the past." "What's the name of the song?" "'Kafka on the Shore.'" Oshima says. "'Kafka on the Shore'?" "That's correct, Kafka Tamura.
Haruki Murakami
#56. For words are magical formulae. They leave finger marks be hind on the brain, which in the twinkling of an eye become the footprints of history. One ought to watch one' s every word.
Franz Kafka
#57. Nothing, you know, gives the body greater satisfaction than ordering people about, or at least believing in one's ability to do so.
Franz Kafka
#58. I never wish to be easily defined. I'd rather float over other people's minds as something strictly fluid and non-perceivable; more like a transparent, paradoxically iridescent creature rather than an actual person.
Franz Kafka
#59. Today one may pluck out one's very heart and not find it.
Franz Kafka
#60. It's always questionable to intervene decisively in strange circumstances.
Franz Kafka
#61. When I am not reading Kafka I am thinking about Kafka. When I am not thinking about Kafka I miss thinking about him. Having missed thinking about him for a while, I take him out and read him again. That's how it works.
Laszlo Krasznahorkai
#62. But perhaps the enthusiastic sensibility of young women of her age also played a role. This feeling sought release at every opportunity, and with it Grete now felt tempted to want to make Gregor's situation even more terrifying, so that then she would be able to do even more for him than now.
Franz Kafka
#63. The whole visible world is perhaps nothing other than a motivation of man's wish to rest for a moment an attempt to falsify the fact of knowledge, to try to turn the knowledge into the goal.
Franz Kafka
#65. But this is something you have to figure out on your own. Nobody can help you. That's what love's all about, Kafka. You're the one having those wonderful feelings. but you have to go it alone as you wander through the dark. Your mind and body have to bear it. All by yourself.
Haruki Murakami
#66. K.'s uncle, who had already been made very angry by the long wait, turned abruptly round and retorted, "Ill? You say he's ill?" and strode towards the gentleman in a way that seemed almost threatening, as if he were the illness himself.
Franz Kafka
#67. One of the most effective means of seduction that Evil has is the challenge to struggle. It is like the struggle with women, whichends in bed. A married man's true deviations from the path of virtue are, rightly understood, never gay.
Franz Kafka
#68. Adam's first domestic pet after the expulsion from Paradise was the serpent.
Franz Kafka
#69. The history of the world, as it is written and handed down by word of mouth, often fails us completely; but man's intuitive capacity, though it often misleads, does lead, does not ever abandon one.
Franz Kafka
#70. Celibacy and suicide are a similar levels of understanding, suicide and a martyr's death not so by any means, perhaps marriage and a martyr's death.
Franz Kafka
#71. I am as I am, and that's all there is to it, I can hardly take a pair of scissors to myself, and cut out a different person ...
Franz Kafka
#72. A man might find for a moment that he was unable to work, but that's exactly the right time to remember his past accomplishments and to consider that later on, when the obstacles has been removed, he's bound to work all the harder and more efficiently.
Franz Kafka
#73. Why does loving somebody mean you have to hurt them just as much? I mean if that's the way it goes, what's the point of loving someone? Why the hell does it have to be like that?
Haruki Murakami
#74. Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one's own self.
Franz Kafka
#75. No one will read what I write here, no one will come to help me ... My ship is rudderless, it's driven by the wind blowing into the nethermost regions of death.
Franz Kafka
#76. It's only because of their stupidity that they're able to be so sure of themselves.
Franz Kafka
#77. Which of us would not have been happy under Alexander's radiant gaze? But Diogenes frantically begged him to move out of the way of the sun. That tub was full of ghosts.
Franz Kafka
#78. What's happened to me,' he thought. It was no dream.
Franz Kafka
#79. There can be no more beautiful spot to die in, no spot more worthy of total despair, than one's own novel.
Franz Kafka
#80. I would never have named them in the
first place as they are not the ones I hold responsible. It's the organization that's to blame, the high officials are the ones to blame.
Franz Kafka
#81. I do hang out with girls, I do relax. But I am a hermit sometimes and get a bit too introverted, too 'Jean-Paul Sartre' and intellectual in my head. And it's like a Kafka novel in there, things get nuts. Then I have to remind myself to get out and I will go and play ice hockey with my friends.
Josh Peck
#82. Kafkaesque
The term's meaning has transcended the literary realm to apply to real-life occurrences and situations that are incomprehensibly complex, bizarre, or illogical.
Franz Kafka
#83. German is my mother tongue and as such more natural to me, but I consider Czech much more affectionate, which is why your letter removes several uncertainties; I see you more clearly, the movements of your body, your hands, so quick, so resolute, it's almost like a meeting.
Franz Kafka
#84. Gregor's glance then turned to the window. The dreary weather - the
rain drops were falling audibly down on the metal window
ledge - made him quite melancholy.
Franz Kafka
#85. Passionless is vulgar ("Metier: Why I Don't Write Like Franz Kafka")
William S. Wilson
#86. Since adolescence I've had a passion for Romantic Fantastique literature, which continued with Expressionism and culminated with the genius of Kafka. It's that German thread of the metaphysic - they were looking for the beyond in dreams.
Dumitru Tepeneag
#87. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired. Only after death, only in solitude, does a man's true nature emerge. In death, as on the chimney sweep's Saturday night, the soot gets washed from his body.
Franz Kafka
#88. Kafka, in everybody's life there's a point of no return. And in a very few cases, a point where you can't go forward anymore. And when we reach that point, all we can do is quietly accept the fact.
Haruki Murakami
#89. I've been wrestling with Kafka since I was an adolescent. I think he's a great aphorist, a great letter writer, a great diarist, a great short story writer, and a great novelist - I'd put novelist last.
John Banville
#90. Yet Gregor's sister
was playing so beautifully. Her face was leant to one side,
following the lines of music with a careful and melancholy
expression. Gregor crawled a little further forward, keeping his
head close to the ground so that he could meet her eyes if the
chance came.
Franz Kafka
#91. [on Springsteen's "Stolen Car":] A kind of mystical film noir, written by Kafka and shot by Polanski.
Adam Sweeting
#92. That's how it will be, except that in reality, both today and later, one will stand there with a palpable body and a real head, a real forehead, that is, for smiting on with one's hand.
Franz Kafka
#93. It's impossible to defend oneself in the absence of goodwill
Franz Kafka
#94. Yur Karyakin once wrote: 'We should not judge a man's life by his perception of himself. Such a perception may be tragically inadequate.' And I read something in Kafka to the effect that man was irretrievably lost within himself.
Svetlana Alexievich
#95. You see, Willem, he admits he doesn't know the law, and at the same time claims he's innocent.
Franz Kafka
#96. If they were shocked, then Gregor was no longer responsible.' This passage betray's Gregor's premeditation and points to the idea that Gregor wanted to change into a monstrous vermin- something incapable of working in an office.
Franz Kafka
#97. She is so distinct to me, it's as though I had run my hands all over her.
Franz Kafka
#98. When one has lived for thirty years in this world and had to fight one's way through it, as I have had to do, one becomes hardened to surprises and doesn't take them too seriously.
Franz Kafka
#99. But I'm not guilty," said K. "there's been a mistake. How is it even possible for someone to be guilty? We're all human beings here, one like the other." "That is true" said the priest "but that is how the guilty speak
Franz Kafka
#100. 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
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