Franz Kafka: Trending quotes

“Evil is whatever distracts.”

“I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.”

“I am free and that is why I am lost.”

“A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity."

[, July 5, 1922]”

“I have spent all my life resisting the desire to end it.”

“I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.”

“I’m tired, can’t think of anything and want only to lay my face in your lap, feel your hand on my head and remain like that through all eternity.”

“I am always trying to convey something that can’t be conveyed, to explain something which is inexplicable, to tell about something I have in my bones, something which can be expressed only in the bones.”

“Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable.”

“Truth is indivisible, hence it cannot recognize itself; anyone who wants to recognize it has to be a lie.”

“I dream of a grave, deep and narrow, where we could clasp each other in our arms as with clamps, and I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more”

“I only fear danger where I want to fear it.”

“What am I doing here in this endless winter?”

“But I’m not guilty,” said K. “there’s been a mistake. How is it even possible for someone to be guilty? We’re all human beings here, one like the other.” “That is true” said the priest “but that is how the guilty speak”

“May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.”

“sleep is the most innocent creature there is and a sleepless man
the most guilty.”

“And don't demand any sincerity from me, Milena. No one can demand it from me more than I myself and yet many things elude me, I'm sure, perhaps everything eludes me.”

“You too have weapons.”

“The meaning of life is that it stops.”