Quote

The purpose of a story is to be an axe that breaks up the ice within us.

Franz Kafka

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Franz Kafka
Age: 41 †
Born: 1883
Born: July 3
Died: 1924
Died: July 3
Aphorist
Claims Adjuster
Diarist
Fabulist
Lawyer
Novelist
Poet Lawyer
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
Translator
Writer
Praha
František Kafka
Kafka
Stories
Breaks
Ice
Break
Within
Story
Purpose

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The notion of the infinite expanse and copiousness of the cosmos is the result of the mixture, carried to the extreme limit, of laborious creation and free self-determination.
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I am more uncertain than I ever was I feel only the power of life. And I am senselessly empty.
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Youth is happy because it has the ability to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.
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In a certain sense you deny the existence of this world. You explain life as a state of rest, a state of rest in motion.
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There they lay, but not in the forgetfulness of the previous night. She was seeking and he was seeking, they raged and contorted their faces and bored their heads into each others bosom in the urgency of seeking something, and their embraces and their tossing limbs did not avail to make them forget, but only reminded them of what they sought
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It is often safer to be in chains than to be free.
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The old incapacity. Interrupted my writing for barely ten days and already cast out. Once again prodigious efforts stand before me. You have to dive down, as it were, and sink more rapidly than that which sinks in advance of you.
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There are questions we could not get past if we were not set free from them by our very nature.
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The true way goes over a rope which is not stretched at any great height but just above the ground. It seems more designed to make people stumble than to be walked upon.
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In argument similes are like songs in love they describe much, but prove nothing.
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I dream of a grave, deep and narrow, where we could clasp each other in our arms as with clamps, and I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more
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The relationship to one's fellow man is the relationship of prayer, the relationship to oneself is the relationship of striving it is from prayer that one draws the strength for one's striving.
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Written kisses don't reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts.
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The thornbush is the old obstacle in the road. It must catch fire if you want to go further.
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I am a retiring, silent, unsociable, and discontent person.
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Anyone who renounces the world must love all men, for he renounces their world too. He thus begins to have some inkling of the true nature of man, which cannot but be loved, always assuming that one is its peer.
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Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.
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And so gentlemen, I learned. Oh, if you have to learn, you learn if you’re desperate for a way out, you learn you learn pitilessly. You stand over yourself with a whip in your hand if there’s the least resistance, you lash yourself.
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Follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.
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