Such a young trial!
franz Kafkaquotes
1883 - 1924
The novels and short stories of German-Jewish lawyer, Franz Kafka (1883-1924), continue to awaken literary debate, and provoke new and living interpretations for each generation who reads them. Kafka’s fame arose after his death, and his writing greatly influenced German literature.
A somewhat tormented soul, who wrestled with depression, social anxiety, suicide and a tyrannical father, was nonetheless, a writer who masterfully suspended the fantastical within reality (The Judgement), and the literal within the metaphor (The Metamorphosis).
His friends found him charming and humorous, and he had neat, boyish good looks. Nonetheless, his battle with tuberculosis, and a deep fear that people found him repulsive infected his romantic relationships, and contributed to a certain self-loathing.
His literature brings us commentary on divine grace and authentic living, man’s struggle to find security (In the Penal Colony, Amerika), overcoming isolation (The Castle) and finding one’s purpose (Description of a Struggle, The Great Wall of China).
And though his parents never did understand his need to record his “dreamlike inner state,” the rest of the world can appreciate how his works transcend meaning and interpretation, always letting the reader go further into the mind, the heart, the estrangement of the modern man.
But when I want to draw close to someone, and fully commit myself, then my misery is assured. Then I am nothing, and what can I do with nothingness? I must admit that your letter this morning (by the afternoon it had changed) arrived at just the right moment; I was in need of those very words.
Every new discovery is assumed at once into the sum total of knowledge, and with that ceases in a sense to be a discovery; it dissolves into the whole and disappears, and one must have a trained scientific eye even to recognize it after that.
It seemed remarkable to Gregor that above all the various noises of eating their chewing teeth could still be heard, as if they had wanted to show Gregor that you need teeth in order to eat and it was not possible to perform anything with jaws that are toothless however nice they might be.
In her opinion her singing falls on deaf ears anyway; there is no lack of enthusiasm and applause, but she has long since given up hope of genuine understanding as she conceives it.
Gregor’s glance then turned to the window. The dreary weather – the rain drops were falling audibly down on the metal window ledge – made him quite melancholy.
“Don’t look at him!” he snapped, without noticing how odd it was to speak to free men in this way.
Without any way out, not even toward the depth.
But happiness only if I can raise the world into the Pure, the True, the Immutable.
So if you find nothing in the corridors open the doors, and if you find nothing behind these doors there are more floors, and if you find nothing up there, don’t worry, just leap up another flight of stairs. As long as you don’t stop climbing, the stairs won’t end, under your climbing feet they will go on growing upwards.