“Books are a narcotic.”

— Franz Kafka

Last update March 19, 2022. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Books are a narcotic." by Franz Kafka?

Franz Kafka photo

Franz Kafka 266

author 1883–1924

Related quotes

“Anyone wanting slyly to avoid suffering identifies with the entirety of the universe, judges each thing as if he were it. In the same way, he imagines, at bottom, that he will never die. We receive these hazy illusions like a narcotic necessary to bear life. But what happens to us when, disintoxicated, we learn what we are? Lost among babblers in a night in which we can only hate the appearance of light which comes from babbling. The self-acknowledged suffering of the disintoxicated is the subject of this book.”

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) French intellectual and literary figure

Source: L’Expérience Intérieure (1943), p. xxxii

“Where is a book before it is born? Does a book grow like a tree? Who are a book's parents? Does a book need two parents -- a mother and a father? Can a book be born inside another book? And where is the parent book of books?”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

From the seventh book, "The Book of Youth"
The Pillow Book

“My book or some other book said the judge. What is to be deviates no jot from the book wherein it's writ. How could it? It would be a false book and a false book is no book at all.”

Cormac McCarthy book Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian (1985)

“A book,
a book full
of human touches,
of shirts,
a book
without loneliness, with men
and tools,
a book
is victory.”

Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) Chilean poet

Source: Odes to Common Things

“The Bible is a book of faith, and a book of doctrine, and a book of morals, and a book of religion, of especial revelation from God.”

Daniel Webster (1782–1852) Leading American senator and statesman. January 18, 1782 – October 24, 1852. Served as the Secretary of Sta…

Source: On the Completion of the Bunker Hill Monument (1843), p. 102

“Books which are no books.”

Charles Lamb Last Essays of Elia

Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)..
Last Essays of Elia (1833)

“It's in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book become one of a million different books…”

Mohsin Hamid book How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

Source: How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

“If I were asked what book is better than a cheap book, I should answer that there is one book better than a cheap book, — and that is a book honestly come by.”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat

Before the U. S. Senate Committee on Patents (29 January 1886)

“All books are divisible into two classes: the books of the hours, and the books of all Time.”

John Ruskin (1819–1900) English writer and art critic

Source: Sesame and Lilies

“The fact is that poetry is not the books in the library... Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

"Poetry" (1977)

Related topics