The voices / 158 fragments

Franz Kafka

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Archive entries

01Undated

We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.

Franz Kafka / quote

02Undated

Every word first looks around in every direction before letting itself be written down by me.

Franz Kafka / quote

03Undated

Writer speaks a stench.

Franz Kafka / quote

04Undated

Writing is prayer.

Franz Kafka / quote

05Undated

In a way, I was safe writing

Franz Kafka / quote

06Undated

What is written is merely the dregs of experience.

Franz Kafka / quote

07Undated

Each of us has his own way of emerging from the underworld, mine is by writing. That's why the only way I can keep going, if at all, is by writing, not through rest and sleep. I am far more likely to achieve peace of mind through writing than the capacity to write through peace.

Franz Kafka / quote

08Undated

Evil does not exist; once you have crossed the threshold, all is good. Once in another world, you must hold your tongue.

Franz Kafka / quote

09Undated

If a man has his eyes bound, you can encourage him as much as you like to stare through the bandage, but he'll never see anything.

Franz Kafka / quote

10Undated

Productivity is being able to do things that you were never able to do before.

Franz Kafka / quote

11Undated

Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.

Franz Kafka / quote

12Undated

A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.

Franz Kafka / quote

13Undated

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.

Franz Kafka / quote

14Undated

Books are a narcotic.

Franz Kafka / quote

15Undated

We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

Franz Kafka / quote

16Undated

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 on 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. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe.

Franz Kafka / quote

17Undated

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for?

Franz Kafka / quote

18Undated

The door could not be heard slamming; they had probably left it open, as is the custom in homes where a great misfortune has occurred.

Franz Kafka / quote

19Undated

And thus it happens that the reader, the closer he comes to the novel's end, the more he wishes he were back in the summer with which it begins, and finally, instead of following the hero onto the cliffs of suicide, joyfully turns back to that summer, content to stay there forever.

Franz Kafka / quote

20Undated

I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones. Basically it is nothing other than this fear we have so often talked about, but fear spread to everything, fear of the greatest as of the smallest, fear, paralyzing fear of pronouncing a word, although this fear may not only be fear but also a longing for something greater than all that is fearful.

Franz Kafka / quote

21Undated

I only fear danger where I want to fear it.

Franz Kafka / quote

22Undated

In general I lacked principally the ability to provide even in the slightest detail for the real future. I thought only of things in the present and their present condition, not because of thoroughness or any special, strong interest, but rather, to the extent that weakness in thinking was not the cause, because of sorrow and fear – sorrow, because the present was so sad for me that I thought I could not leave it before it resolved itself into happiness; fear, because, like my fear of the slightest action in the present, I also considered myself, in view of my contemptible, childish appearance, unworthy of forming a serious, responsible opinion of the great, manly future which usually seemed so impossible to me that every short step forward appeared to me to be counterfeit and the next step unattainable.

Franz Kafka / quote

23Undated

I long for you; I who usually longs without longing, as though I am unconscious and absorbed in neutrality and apathy, really, utterly long for every bit of you.

Franz Kafka / quote

24Undated

What's happened to me,' he thought. It was no dream.

Franz Kafka / quote