And actually it is not you at all I love, but rather the existence you have bestowed on me.
You have given me a gift such as I never even dreamt of finding in this life.
How can you hold their silence against others, and keep silent yourself?
That was why, if you wanted to keep up a correspondence with him, you couldn’t give him any actual news, the kind you would unthinkingly write to even your most distant acquaintance.
Uncertainty, aridity, peace-all things will resolve themselves into these and pass away.
I stand on the end platform of the tram and am completely unsure of my footing in this world, in this town, in my family.
My money is in the hands of strangers.
K. knew that there was no threat of actual compulsion, he had no fear of that, especially not here, but the force of these discouraging surroundings and of the increasing familiarity with ever more predictable disappointments, the force of scarcely perceptible influences at every moment, these he certainly did fear, but even in the face of this danger he had to risk taking up the struggle.
Always asking the doctor for the impossible. They’ve lost their old faith; the priest sits home and picks his vestments to pieces, one after another; but the doctor is supposed to accomplish everything with his gentle, surgical hands.
Silence, I believe, avoids me, as water on the beach avoids stranded fish.
One ought, Milena, to take your face between both hands and look steadily into your eyes so that you would recognize yourself in the eyes of the other and from then on be incapable even of thinking the kind of things you wrote in the letter.
Every dog has, as I do, the urge to question. And I, like all dogs, have the compulsion to be silent.
Oh, if only you knew how hard I try to find a kernel of good for myself in all you do and say, even if it torments me.
We come to mistake the crumbs of mercy for the feast of love.
I’m in a tight spot, but I’ll also work my way out again.
I don’t feel particularly proud of myself. But when I walk alone in the woods or lie in the meadows, all is well.
I always succeed in not being jealous but only sometimes in comprehending the pointlessness of jealousy.
And what I really intended to say in the end remains unsaid.
He was especially fond of hanging from the ceiling. The experience was quite different from lying on the floor.
They don’t make mistakes. Our authorities, as far as I am aware – and I know only the lowest ranks – don’t actually look for guilt in the population, but are, as the law says, drawn towards guilt and must send us guards out. That’s the law. Where would there be a mistake? ‘I don’t know this law’, said K. ‘That’s your problem,’ said the guard. ‘It probably only exists in your minds’, said K.