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
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Writer
Praha
FrantiĊĦek Kafka
Kafka
Thinking
Head
Books
Reading
Stab
Read
Wound
Doesn
Wounds
Book
Wake
Kind
Blow
Think
Ought

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You're not cross with me, though? he said. She pulled her hand away and answered, No, no, I'm never cross with anyone.
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Follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.
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We are sinful not only because we have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, but also because we have not yet eaten of the Tree of Life. The state in which we are is sinful, irrespective of guilt.
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Writing [is] a form of prayer.
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Utterance does not in principle mean a weakening of conviction--that would not be anything to be deplored--but a weakness of conviction.
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He was a tool of the boss, without brains or backbone.
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My doubts stand in a circle around every word, I see them before I see the word, but what then! I do not see the word at all, I invent it.
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It's sometimes quite astonishing that a single, average life is enough to encompass so much that it's at all possible ever to have any success in one's work here.
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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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I do not speak as I think, I do not think as I should, and so it all goes on in helpless darkness.
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In theory there is a possibility of perfect happiness: To believe in the indestructible element within one, and not to strive towards it.
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It receives you when you come and dismisses you when you go.
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Should I be grateful or should I curse the fact that despite all misfortune I can still feel love, an unearthly love but still for earthly objects.
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The right understanding of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude each other.
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For everything outside the phenomenal world, language can only be used allusively, but never even approximately in a comparative way, since, corresponding as it does to the phenomenal world, it is concerned only with property and its relations.
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I answer one of your letters, then lie in bed in apparent calm, but my heart beats through my entire body and is conscious only of you. I belong to you there is really no other way of expressing it, and that is not strong enough.
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Man cannot live without a permanent trust in something indestructible in himself, though both the indestructible element and the trust may remain permanently hidden from him. One of the ways in which this hiddenness can express itself is through faith in a personal god.
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I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.
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