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A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.

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
Break
Literature
Reading
Soul
Seas
Book
Frozen
Must
Ice
Sea
Inside

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Two tasks at the beginning of your life: to narrow your orbit more and more, and ever and again to check whether you are not in hiding somewhere outside your orbit.
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Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.
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There is a down-and-outness under true knowledge and a childlike happy arising from it.
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Going to pieces. To go to pieces so pointlessly and unnecessarily.
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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 mediation by the serpent was necessary. Evil can seduce man, but cannot become man.
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There's no quiet place here on earth for our love, not in the village and not anywhere else, so I picture a grave, deep and narrow, in which we embrace as if clamped together, I bury my face against you, you yours against me, and no one will ever see us.
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I am a retiring, silent, unsociable, and discontent person.
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It is strange how little sharpsightedness women possess they only notice whether they please, then whether they arouse pity, and finally, whether you look for compassion from them. That is all come to think of it, it may even be enough, generally speaking.
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Writing [is] a form of prayer.
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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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Writers speak stench.
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I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.
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Two possibilities: making oneself infinitely small or being so. The second is perfection, that is to say, inactivity, the first is beginning, that is to say, action.
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You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.
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