His numerous legs, pitifully thin in comparison to the rest of his circumference, flickered helplessly before his eyes.
The court wants nothing from you. It receives you when you come and dismisses you when you go.
Enlightenment comes to the most dull-witted. It begins around the eyes. From there it radiates.
An Empress drank her husband’s blood in long draughts thousands of years ago.
ALAS,” said the mouse, “the world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when at last I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into.” “You only need to change your direction,” said the cat, and ate it up. Translated.
Franz’s domineering father expected his son to take up a profitable business career that would ensure social advancement for the family, as well as a successful marriage promising the same.
Kafka earned his doctorate in law in 1906 but decided against practicing, to the disappointment of his father.
Kafka’s fiction examines a universe largely unexplored in the literature preceding him, one full of implications that venture into the remote regions of human psychology. It’s a universe with different rules than those governing our reality. And there’s no map.
If anything, his parables guarantee the failure not only of his characters, but of readers wishing to abstract any lessons applicable to their own lives. Failure, it seems, is Kafka’s true subject.
Why do you have to go to the cathedral?′ said Leni. K. tried to explain briefly, but he had hardly begun when Leni suddenly said: ‘They are hounding you.’ K., who could not bear anyone feeling sorry for him unexpectedly or gratuitously, broke off abruptly with just two words; but as he hung up the receiver he said, half to himself and half to the distant woman who could no longer hear him: ‘Yes, they are hounding me.
Human beings have to have their sleep.
As Gregor Samsa awoke from unsettling dreams one morning, he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.′ This is marvelously funny. Instead of waking up from a nightmare, Gregor wakes up into one. Reality, the only balm for bad dreams, is significantly less reassuring when you wake up hideously disfigured.
It follows, perhaps, that we are now both married, you in Vienna, I to my fear in Prague, and that not only you, but I too, tug in vain at our marriage.
In Kafka’s story “Wedding Preparations in the Country,” Edward Raban fantasizes about splitting into two forms: one, to remain in bed all day, dreaming; the other, to go forth and conduct the business of the world.
If they were shocked, then Gregor was no longer responsible.′ This passage betray’s Gregor’s premeditation and points to the idea that Gregor wanted to change into a monstrous vermin- something incapable of working in an office.
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.