Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors
Franz Kafka
Top 10 Best Quotes
“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for?”
“I don't feel particularly proud of myself. But when I walk alone in the woods or lie in the meadows, all is well.”
“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? (...) We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.”
“During last night’s insomnia, as these thoughts came and went between my aching temples, I realised once again, what I had almost forgotten in this recent period of relative calm, that I tread a terribly tenuous, indeed almost non-existent soil spread over a pit full of shadows, whence the powers of darkness emerge at will to destroy my life…”
“After tormenting myself for a long time, I am stopping. I am unable and in the near future will scarcely be able to complete the remaining pieces.”
“The amount of quiet I need does not exist in the world, from which it follows that no one ought to need so much quiet.”
“That is a very poor career, but only a poor career give the world the light that an imperfect, but pretty good writer wants to generate--at all costs, unfotunately.”
“I don’t complain about the work so much as about the sluggishness of swampy time. The office hours, you see, cannot be divided up; even in the last half hour I feel the pressure of the eight hours just as much as in the first. Often it is like a train ride lasting night and day, until in the end you’re totally crushed; you no longer think about the straining of the engine, or about the hilly or flat countryside, but ascribe all that’s happening to your watch alone, which you continually hold in your palm.”
“Forgive me for not having answered you right off, but I still have not developed the technique for making good use of my few hours; midnight comes apace, as now.”
“Whatever it’s actually been, I felt declassed; people who have not lazed away at least part of their time up to their twenty-fifth year are greatly to be pitied, for it’s my belief that it’s not the money you have earned that you take with you into your grave, but your idle time.”
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Book Keywords:
reading, on-rober-walser, words, destruction, calm, darkness, insomnia, literature, books
