A loyal and loving son, Gregor feels obligated to pay off his parents’ debt. Simply quitting would betray that loyalty.
Their inability to disengage from work in the evening deprives them of the only possible respite from labor, and life without some kind of rest is torture. The worst irony is that taking care of the verminous Gregor is a filthy chore. Gregor, by escaping work, has not only forced his former dependents into labor, but has become work: disgusting work that only his disgraced family can perform.
Being alone has a power over me that never fails. My interior dissolves and is ready to release what lies deeper.
With a kind of perverse obstinancy his father refused to take off his official uniform even in the house; and while his robe hung uselessly on the clothes hook, his father dozed, completely dressed, in his chair, as if he were always ready for duty and were waiting even here for the voice of his superior.
The dogs are still playing in the yard, but the quarry will not escape them, never mind how fast it is running through the forest already.
When one is alone, imperfection must be endured every minute of the day.
I am a memory come alive, hence my insomnia.
Sono stato due ore coricato sul divano e credo di non aver pensato ad altro che a te.
My powers of reasoning are incredibly limited; to sense the development in the results, that I can do, but to ascend from the development of the results or step by step to reconstruction it from the results, that is not given to me. It is though as I were falling down upon these things, and caught sight of them only in the confusion of my fall.
As happiness recedes into dreams, the passion ended where it began: in sleepness.
He is a land surveyor, well, perhaps that is something, he has trained at something, but if there’s nothing you can do with that training then it means nothing.
He watched as it slowly began to get light everywhere outside the window too. Then, without his willing it, his head sank down completely, and his last breath flowed weakly from his nostrils.
Hers was a nature made for intrigue, apparently working for no purpose, like the wind, according to strange and distant orders of which no one ever got a sight.
I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones.
He was always inclined to take life as lightly as he could, to cross bridges when he came to them, pay no heed for the future, even when everything seemed under threat. But here that did not seem the right thing to do.
The chains that cuff humanity are made of office paper.
Amalia smiled, and that smile, although a sad one, lit up her sombre face, made her silence eloquent and her strangeness familiar. It was like the telling of a secret, a hitherto closely guarded possession that could be taken back, but never taken back entirely.
Please, Father, let he future rest, as it deserves. If you wake it ahead of time, the only result is a sleepy-headed present. You shouldn’t need your son to remind you of that.
Alone – do you know what that means?
Ah, coherence, that old canard. All the books are full of it, in all the classrooms the teachers are chalking it up on the blackboard; the mother dreams of it while her baby is at her breast – and there you are, sitting here, asking me about coherence. You must have had an unusually misspent youth.