The main thing holding the family back from a change in living quarters was far more their complete hopelessness and the idea that they had been struck by a misfortune like no one else in their entire circle of relatives and acquaintances.
The amount of quiet I need does not exist in the world, from which it follows that no one ought to need so much quiet.
He remembered his family with deep feelings of love.
The messiah will come when we don’t need him anymore.
Write to me only once a week, so that your letter arrives on Sunday – for I cannot endure your daily letters, I am incapable of enduring them. For instance, I answer one of your letters, then lie in bed in apparent calm, but my heart beats through my entire body and is conscious only of you. I belong to you.
Leo en Dostoievski el pasaje que tanto se asemeja a ser desdichado.
Oh, God”, he thought, “what a strenuous career it is that I’ve chosen! Travelling day in and day out. Doing business like this takes much more effort than doing your own business at home, and on top of that there’s the curse of travelling, worries about making train connections, bad and irregular food, contact with different people all the time so that you can never get to know anyone or become friendly with them. It can all go to Hell!
I am as I am, and that’s all there is to it, I can hardly take a pair of scissors to myself, and cut out a different person...
The man from the country has not expected such difficulties; the law, he thinks, should be accessible to everyone and at all times; but as he now takes a closer look at the doorkeeper in his fur coat, at his large pointed nose, his long, sparse, black Tartar beard, he decides that it is better, after all, to wait until he receives permission to enter.
I would be speaking even with my silence, because at the moment I am nothing but a single word.
All he wanted to do now was to get up quietly and undisturbed, get dressed, and, most important, eat breakfast, and only then consider what to do next, because, as he was well aware, in bed he could never think of anything through to a reasonable conclusion.
She is so distinct to me, it’s as though I had run my hands all over her.
He had indeed been so close to forgetting that only the voice of the mother, so long unheard, brought him to his senses.
It’s characteristic of this judicial system that a man is condemned not only when he’s innocent but also in ignorance.
There was always something in me to catch fire, in this heap of straw that I have been.
Life is as infinitely great and profound as the immensity of the stars above us. One can only look at it through the narrow keyhole of one’s own personal experience. But through it one perceives more than one can see. So above all one must keep the keyhole clean.
I am dead and despise anyone who isn’t.
They linked arms with him in a way K. had never walked with anyone before.
Sometimes, and I don’t know why, everything I want to say to you presses upon me with great intensity, like a crowd of people all trying to squeeze through a narrow door at once. And I have said nothing to you, less than nothing, for everything I have written recently has been false – not fundamentally, of course, because fundamentally everything is true – but with so much confusion and falseness on the surface that no one could be expected to see through it.
Above all, he could not stop half way, that was nonsense not only in business but always and everywhere.