Franz Kafka

There art two cardinal sins from which all others spring: Impatience and Laziness.

What do I have in common with Jews? I don't even have anything in common with myself.

Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.

All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else.

They were offered the choice between becoming kings or the couriers of kings. The way children would, they all wanted to be couriers. Therefore there are only couriers who hurry about the world, shouting to each other - since there are no kings - messages that have become meaningless. They would like to put an end to this miserable life of theirs but they dare not because of their oaths of service.

I can prove at any time that my education tried to make another person out of me than the one I became. It is for the harm, therefore, that my educators could have done me in accordance with their intentions that I reproach them; I demand from their hands the person I now am, and since they cannot give him to me, I make of my reproach and laughter a drumbeat sounding in the world beyond.

There they lay, but not in the forgetfulness of the previous night. She was seeking and he was seeking, they raged and contorted their faces and bored their heads into each others bosom in the urgency of seeking something, and their embraces and their tossing limbs did not avail to make them forget, but only reminded them of what they sought

What I write is different from what I say, what I say is different from what I think, what I think is different from what I ought to think and so it goes further into the deepest darkness.

Was he an animal, that music could move him so? He felt as if the way to the unknown nourishment he longed for were coming to light.

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.

My grandfather used to say: Life is astoundingly short. To me, looking back over it, life seems so foreshortened that I scarcely understand, for instance, how a young man can decide to ride over to the next village without being afraid that -not to mention accidents- even the span of a normal happy life may fall far short of the time needed for such a journey.

What is written is merely the dregs of experience.

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

And I leave my post of observation and find I have had enough of this outside life; I feel that there is nothing more that I can learn here, either now or at any time. And I long to say a last goodbye to everything up here, to go down into my burrow never to return again, let things take their course, and not try to retard them with my profitless vigils.

If this is what you came for, then I didn't send for you. Kafka (note to himself in journal)

There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe ... but not for us.

The state we find ourselves in is sinful quite independent of guilt.