Asking questions were the most important thing.
Above all, the free man is superior to the man who has to serve another.
How pathetically scanty my self-knowledge is compared with, say, my knowledge of my room.
If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skulls, then why do we read it? Good God, we also would be happy if we had no books and such books that make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. What we must have are those books that come on us like ill fortune, like the death of one we love better than ourselves, like suicide. A book must be an ice axe to break the sea frozen inside us.
I did not fall heavily, nor did I feel any pain, but 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 one’s guard against them. Yet nothing seemed more natural than to lie here on the grass, my arms beside my body, my face hidden.
I look a girl in the eye and it was a very long love story with thunder and kisses and lightning. I live fast.
You belong to me, even if I should never see you again.
Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.
I can never tear myself open wide enough to people to reveal everything and so frighten them away.
Don’t be too hasty, don’t take somebody else’s opinion without testing it.
I was wise, if you like, because I was prepared for death at any moment, but not because I had taken care of everything that was given to me to do, rather because I had done none of it and could not even hope ever to do any of it.
But what now if all the peace, the comfort, the contentment were to come to a horrible end?
I have discovered your great wound. You are dying from this flower blooming on your side.
I repeat: there was no attraction for me in imitating human beings; I imitated them because I needed a way out, and for no other reason.
The gesture of rejection with which I was forever met did not mean: ‘I do not love you,’ but: ‘You cannot love me, much as you would like; you are unhappily in love with your love for me, but your love for me is not in love with you.’ It is consequently incorrect to say that I have known the words, ‘I love you’; I have known only the expectant stillness that should have been broken by my ‘I love you,’ that is all that I have known, nothing more.
Everyone has his cross to bear.
I waver, continually fly to the summit of the mountain, but cannot stay up there for more than a moment. Others waver too, but in lower regions, with greater strength; if they are in danger of falling, they are caught up by the kinsman who walks beside them for that purpose. But I waver on the heights; it is not death, alas, but the eternal torments of dying.
What are our lungs supposed to do?” I shouted. Shouted: “If they breathe fast they suffocate themselves from inner poisons; if they breathe slowly they suffocate from unbreathable air, from outraged things. But if they try to search for their own rhythm they perish from the mere search.
Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn’t shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we’d be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves.
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.