Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafkawas a German-language writer of novels and short stories who is widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His work, which fuses elements of realism and the fantastic, typically features isolated protagonists faced by bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible social-bureaucratic powers, and has been interpreted as exploring themes of alienation, existential anxiety, guilt, and absurdity. His best known works include "Die Verwandlung", Der Process, and Das Schloss. The term Kafkaesque has entered the English...
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth3 July 1883
CityPrague, Czech Republic
I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.
There is a down-and-outness under true knowledge and a childlike happy arising from it.
We were expelled from Paradise, but it was not destroyed. The expulsion from Paradise was in one sense a piece of good fortune, for if we had not been expelled, Paradise would have had to be destroyed.
The limited circle is pure.
All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else.
I have spent all my life resisting the desire to end it.
I can't feel a thing; All mournful petal storms are dancing inside the very private spring of my head.
There's no quiet place here on earth for our love, not in the village and not anywhere else, so I picture a grave, deep and narrow, in which we embrace as if clamped together, I bury my face against you, you yours against me, and no one will ever see us.
What if I slept a little more and forgot about all this nonsense.
The Expulsion from Paradise is eternal in its principal aspect: this makes it irrevocable, and our living in this world inevitable, but the eternal nature of the process has the effect that not only could we remain forever in Paradise, but that we are currently there, whether we know it or not.
One advantage in keeping a diary is that you become aware with reassuring clarity of the changes which you constantly suffer.
In the fight between you and the world, back the world.
Let me remind you of the old maxim: people under suspicion are better moving than at rest, since at rest they may be sitting in the balance without knowing it, being weighed together with their sins.
A stair not worn hollow by footsteps is, regarded from its own point of view, only a boring something made of wood.