The person I am in the company of my sisters has been entirely different from the person I am in the company of other people. Fearless, powerful, surprising, moved as I otherwise am only when I write.
I am in chains. Don’t touch my chains.
Like tired dogs they stand there, because they use up all their strength in remaining upright in one’s memory.
It receives you when you come and dismisses you when you go.
Hold fast to the diary from today on! Write regularly! Don’t surrender! Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it every moment.
I am on the hunt for constructions. I come into a room and find them whitely merging in a corner.
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.
Love is a drama of contradictions.
Was he an animal, that music could move him so? He felt as if the way to the unknown nourishment he longed for were coming to light.
The door could not be heard slamming; they had probably left it open, as is the custom in homes where a great misfortune has occurred.
If they were shocked, then Gregor had no further responsibility and could be calm. But if they took everything calmly, he he, too, had no reason to get excited and could, if he hurried, actually be at the station by eight o’clock.
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 speakes he lies.
Writer speaks a stench.
So eager are our people to obliterate the present.
How pathetically scanty my self-knowledge is compared with, say, my knowledge of my room. There is no such thing as observation of the inner world, as there is of the outer world.
It is only our conception of time that makes us call the Last Judgement by this name. It is, in fact, a kind of martial law.
In argument similes are like songs in love; they describe much, but prove nothing.
We are separated from God on two sides; the Fall separates us from Him, the Tree of Life separates Him from us.
Suffering is the positive element in this world, indeed it is the only link between this world and the positive.
My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted.