Sometimes she would hide her eyes behind her hands, and then no words could get through to her.
Karl, oh my Karl!′ she cried, as if by gazing at him she were confirming her possession, while Karl saw absolutely nothing and felt uncomfortable in the warm bedding that she seemed to have piled up specially for his benefit.
He had vented all his woes and now they might as well see the few rags that covered his body, after which they could carry him away.
But the condemned man looked so submissively doglike that it seemed as if he might have been allowed to run free on the slopes and would only need to be whistled for when the execution was due to begin.
Enlightenment comes to even the dimmest. It begins around the eyes, and it spreads outward from there- a sight that might tempt one to lie down under the harrow oneself.
How could a man not be sickened when the felt in his mouth had been gnawed and drooled on by more than a hundred men as they lay dying?
Meanwhile, the majority of the audience- this is plain to see- has retreated into itself. Here in these brief gaps between their troubles our people dream; it is as if the limbs of each were loosened, as if every last uneasy individual were for once allowed to stretch out and relax freely in the great warm bed of the people.
By his own account he had no real contact with the local colony of his countrymen and virtually no social intercourse with the Russian families and so resigned himself to becoming an incurable bachelor.
As I lie in bed I assume the shape of a big beetle, a stag beetle or a cockchafer, I think.
But Georg was not inclined to write of his commercial success to his friend, and were he to do so now, it would appear especially peculiar. So Georg always confined himself to relating the trivial matters that randomly arise from a disorganized memory on a reflective Sunday.
On the other hand, there are also dark moments, such as everyone has, when you think you’ve achieved nothing at all, when it seems that the only trials to come to a good end are those that were determined to have a good end from the start and would do so without any help, while all the others are lost despite all the running to and fro, all the effort, all the little, apparent successes that gave such joy.
So now you know what else existed in the world outside of you, before you knew only about yourself!
K.’s uncle, who had already been made very angry by the long wait, turned abruptly round and retorted, “Ill? You say he’s ill?” and strode towards the gentleman in a way that seemed almost threatening, as if he were the illness himself.
Oh well, memories, said I. Yes, even remembering in itself is sad, yet how much more its object! Don’t let yourself in for things like that, it’s not for you and not for me. It only weakens one’s present position without strengthening the former one – nothing is more obvious – quite apart from the fact that the former one doesn’t need strengthening.
I am not actually tired, but numb and heavy, and can’t find the right words. All I can say is: Stay with me, don’t leave me.
Logic may indeed be unshakeable, but it cannot withstand a man who is determined to live. Where was the judge he had never seen? Where was the High Court he had never reached? He raised his hands and spread out all his fingers. But the hands of one of the men closed round his throat, just as the other drove the knife deep into his heart and turned it twice.
But that is past and should remain deep in the past.
First of all, the free man is superior to the bound man. Now the man is in fact free: he can go wherever he wishes, the entrance to the Law alone is denied to him, and this only by one person, the doorkeeper. If he sits on the stool at the side of the door and spends the rest of his life there, he does so of his own free will; the story mentions no element of force.
The moon shone down on everything with that simplicity and serenity which no other light possesses.
I am forever chained to myself; that’s what I am, and that’s what I must try to live with.