Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn’t shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we’d be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves.

— Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka Quotes

You belong to the people I have to combat, and you’re very comfortable among them, you’re even in love with the student, or if you don’t love him you do at least prefer him to your husband.

— Franz Kafka

He certainly goes into the offices, but are the offices really the castle? And even if the castle does have offices, are they the offices which Barnabas is allowed to enter?

— Franz Kafka

Language can be used only very obliquely of things outside the physical world, not even metaphorically, since all it knows to do – according to the nature of the physical world – is to treat of ownership and its relations.

— Franz Kafka

As Karl Rossmann, a poor boy of sixteen who had been packed off to America by his parents because a servant girl had seduced him and got herself with child by him, stood on the liner slowly entering the harbour of New York, a sudden burst of sunshine seemed to illumine the Statue of Liberty, so that he saw it in a new light, although he had sighted it long before. The arm with the sword rose up as if newly stretched aloft, and round the figure blew the free winds of heaven.

— Franz Kafka

How suicidal happiness can be!

— Franz Kafka

And actually it is not you at all I love, but rather the existence you have bestowed on me.

— Franz Kafka

You have given me a gift such as I never even dreamt of finding in this life.

— Franz Kafka

How can you hold their silence against others, and keep silent yourself?

— Franz Kafka

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.

— Franz Kafka

Uncertainty, aridity, peace-all things will resolve themselves into these and pass away.

— Franz Kafka

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.

— Franz Kafka

My money is in the hands of strangers.

— Franz Kafka

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.

— Franz Kafka

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.

— Franz Kafka

Silence, I believe, avoids me, as water on the beach avoids stranded fish.

— Franz Kafka

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.

— Franz Kafka

Every dog has, as I do, the urge to question. And I, like all dogs, have the compulsion to be silent.

— Franz Kafka

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.

— Franz Kafka

We come to mistake the crumbs of mercy for the feast of love.

— Franz Kafka

I’m in a tight spot, but I’ll also work my way out again.

— Franz Kafka
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