He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived.
Franz KafkaTags: fear life death dying kafka franz
But sleep? On a night like this? What an idea! Just think of how many thoughts a blanket smothers while one lies alone in bed, and how many unhappy dreams it keeps warm.
Franz KafkaTags: franz-kafka kafka
Self-control is something for which I do not strive. Self-control means wanting to be effective at some random point in the infinite radiations of my spiritual existence.
Franz KafkaTags: franz-kafka kafka
But what if all the tranquility, all the comfort, all the contentment were now to come to a horrifying end?
Franz KafkaYet even if I manage that, one single slip, and a slip cannot be avoided, will stop the whole process, easy and painful alike, and I will have to shrink back into my own circle again.
Franz KafkaTags: franz-kafka kafka
Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it at every moment.
Franz KafkaTags: life heaven salvation moment franz-kafka worthy kafka every-moment
If, in the Judaic perception, the language of the Adamic was that of love, the grammars of fallen man are those of the legal code.
George SteinerTags: love criticism laws kafka
When the little mouse, which was loved as none other was in the mouse-world, got into a trap one night and with a shrill scream forfeited its life for the sight of the bacon, all the mice in the district, in their holes were overcome by trembling and shaking; with eyes blinking uncontrollably they gazed at each other one by one, while their tails scraped the ground busily and senselessly. Then they came out, hesitantly, pushing one another, all drawn towards the scene of death. There it lay, the dear little mouse, its neck caught in the deadly iron, the little pink legs drawn up, and now stiff the feeble body that would so well have deserved a scrap of bacon.
The parents stood beside it and eyed their child's remains.
Tags: death dying mice mouse kafka
My conception of a novel is that it ought to be a personal struggle, a direct and total engagement with the author's story of his or her own life. This conception, again, I take from Kafka, who, although he was never transformed into an insect, and although he never had a piece of food (an apple from his family's table!) lodged in his flesh and rotting there, devoted his whole life as a writer to describing his personal struggle with his family, with women, with moral law, with his Jewish heritage, with his Unconscious, with his sense of guilt, and with the modern world. Kafka's work, which grows out of the nighttime dreamworld in Kafka's brain, is *more* autobiographical than any realistic retelling of his daytime experiences at the office or with his family or with a prostitute could have been. What is fiction, after all, if not a kind of purposeful dreaming? The writer works to create a dream that is vivid and has meaning, so that the reader can then vividly dream it and experience meaning. And work like Kafka's, which seems to proceed directly from dream, is therefore an exceptionally pure form of autobiography. There's an important paradox here that I would like to stress: the greater the autobiographical content of a fiction writer's work, the *smaller* its superficial resemblance to the writer's actual life. The deeper the writer digs for meaning, the more the random particulars of the writer's life become *impediments* to deliberate dreaming.
Jonathan FranzenTags: writing fiction novel kafka
Every single day, each time I see her face, see her, it's utterly precious.
Haruki MurakamiTags: love murakami kafka-on-the-shore kafka miss-saeki
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