Yours(now I'm even losing my name - it was getting shorter and shorter all the time and is now: Yours)
— Letters to Milena
Franz Kafka was a German-language Jewish writer and novelist from Prague, widely regarded as a major figure of 20th-century literature. His works fuse realism with the fantastique and typically follow isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surreal predicaments and incomprehensible bureaucratic powers. The word Kafkaesque entered the lexicon to describe situations like the ones he wrote about.
His best-known works include the novella The Metamorphosis and the novels The Trial and The Castle, and he is also celebrated for brief fables and aphorisms. Born into a middle-class German-speaking family, he trained as a lawyer and worked in legal and insurance jobs while feeling that his true vocation was writing. The Trial, Letters to Milena and The Metamorphosis are his most quoted works in our library.
His best-known works include the novella The Metamorphosis and the novels The Trial and The Castle, and he is also celebrated for brief fables and aphorisms. Born into a middle-class German-speaking family, he trained as a lawyer and worked in legal and insurance jobs while feeling that his true vocation was writing. The Trial, Letters to Milena and The Metamorphosis are his most quoted works in our library.
Most quoted works
- The Trial 10
- Letters to Milena 8
- The Metamorphosis 8
- Diaries of Franz Kafka 5
- The Complete Stories 5
- Blue Octavo Notebooks 3
This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me.
— Diaries of Franz Kafka
In a way, I was safe writing
— Letter to His Father
If a man has his eyes bound, you can encourage him as much as you like to stare through the bandage, but he'll never see anything.
— The Castle
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?
— Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors
The door could not be heard slamming; they had probably left it open, as is the custom in homes where a great misfortune has occurred.
— The Metamorphosis
I only fear danger where I want to fear it.
— The Metamorphosis
I long for you; I who usually longs without longing, as though I am unconscious and absorbed in neutrality and apathy, really, utterly long for every bit of you.
— Letters to Milena
What's happened to me,' he thought. It was no dream.
— The Metamorphosis
The observer of the soul cannot penetrate into the soul, but there doubtless is a margin where he comes into contact with it.
— Blue Octavo Notebooks
However, Gregor had become much calmer. All right, people did not understand his words any more, although they seemed clear enough to him, clearer than previously, perhaps because had gotten used to them
— The Metamorphosis
The existence of the writer is an argument against the existence of the soul, for the soul has obviously taken flight from the real ego, but not improved itself, only become a writer.
I am as I am, and that's all there is to it, I can hardly take a pair of scissors to myself, and cut out a different person...