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If the literature we are reading does not wake us, why then do we read it? A literary work must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside 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
Read
Literary
Doe
Ice
Must
Wake
Work
Sea
Inside
Break
Literature
Reading
Frozen

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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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The spirit becomes free only when it ceases to be a support.
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What if I slept a little more and forgot about all this nonsense.
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I can love only what I can place so high above me that I cannot reach it.
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The Kafka paradox: art depends on truth, but truth, being indivisable, cannot know itself: to tell the truth is to lie. thus the writer is the truth, and yet when he speakes he lies.
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Some books seem like a key to unfamiliar rooms in one’s own castle.
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There will be no proof that I ever was a writer.
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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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If this is what you came for, then I didn't send for you. Kafka (note to himself in journal)
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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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One must not cheat anyone, not even the world of its victory.
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Faith, like a guillotine. As heavy, as light.
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I believe that we should read only those books that bite and sting us. If a book we are reading does not rouse us with a blow to the head, then why read it?
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Evil is the radiation of the human consciousness in certain transitional positions. It is not actually the sensual world that is amere appearance what is so is the evil of it, which, admittedly, is what constitutes the sensual world in our eyes.
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Logic may indeed be unshakeable, but it cannot withstand a man who is determined to live.
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Man cannot live without a continuous confidence in something indestructible within himself.
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