Quote

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?

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
Read
Wound
Doesn
Wounds
Book
Wake
Kind
Blow
Think
Ought
Thinking
Head
Books
Reading
Stab

More quotes by Franz Kafka

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A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.
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The purpose of a story is to be an axe that breaks up the ice within us.
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The true way goes over a line that, rather than spanning heights, is hardly above the ground. It appears more decidedly to make one trip than to be walked along.
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Every thing that you love, you will eventually lose, but in the end, love will return in a different form.
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A belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light.
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Each of us has his own way of emerging from the underworld, mine is by writing. That's why the only way I can keep going, if at all, is by writing, not through rest and sleep. I am far more likely to achieve peace of mind through writing than the capacity to write through peace.
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He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived.
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I carry the bars within me.
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If this is what you came for, then I didn't send for you. Kafka (note to himself in journal)
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Art flies around truth, but with the definite intention of not getting burnt. Its capacity lies in finding in the dark void a place where the beam of light can be intensely caught, without this having been perceptible before.
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There is a goal but no way what we call the way is mere wavering.
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The mediation by the serpent was necessary. Evil can seduce man, but cannot become man.
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All knowledge, the totality of all questions and answers, is contained in the dog.
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People who walk across dark bridges, past saints, with dim, small lights. Clouds which move across gray skies past churches with towers darkened in the dusk. One who leans against granite railing gazing into the evening waters, His hands resting on old stones.
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All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else.
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Don't bend don't water it down don't try to make it logical don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.
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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.
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Books are a narcotic.
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Isolation is a way to know ourselves.
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I’m doing badly, I’m doing well whichever you prefer.
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