Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.
At that point I asked myself: How is it that she is not amazed at herself, that she keeps her lips closed and makes no such remark?
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.
They did not know what we can now sense as we contemplate the course of history: that change begins in the soul before it shows in our lives...
He is a free and secure citizen of the world because he is on a chain that is long enough to allow him access to all parts of the earth, and yet not so long that he could be swept over the edge of it.
No one can crave what truly harms him.
The man in ecstasy and the man drowning – both throw up their arms. The first to signify harmony, the second to signify strife with the elements.
Two tasks at the beginning of your life: to narrow your orbit more and more, and ever and again to check whether you are not in hiding somewhere outside your orbit.
Every word first looks around in every direction before letting itself be written down by me.
Maybe innocence makes its way easiest through the elemental chaos of this world...
One has just been sent out as a biblical dove, has found nothing green, and slips back into the darkness of the Ark.
It would be very unjust to say that you deserted me, but that I was deserted, and sometimes terribly so, is true.
If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it?
I see, these books are probably law books, and it is an essential part of the justice dispensed here that you should be condemned not only in innocence but also in ignorance.
Marrying, founding a family, accepting all the children that come, supporting them in this insecure world, and perhaps even guiding them a little, is, I am convinced, the utmost a human being can succeed in doing at all.
It would have been so pointless to kill himself that, even if he had wanted to, the pointlessness would have made him unable.
You see, I have only such a fugitive awareness of things around me that I always feel they were once real and are now fleeting away.
Art flies around truth, but with the definite intention of not getting burnt. Its capacity lies in finding in the dark void a place where the beam of light can be intensely caught, without this having been perceptible before.
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.
I carry the bars within me.