#kafka

I see, these books are probably law books, and it is an essential part of the justice dispensed here that you should be condemned not only in innocence but also in ignorance. ↗

— Franz Kafka

#injustice #the-trial #injustice

Do you realize that people don't know how to read Kafka simply because they want to decipher him? Instead of letting themselves be carried away by his unequaled imagination, they look for allegories — and come up with nothing but clichés: life is absurd (or it is not absurd), God is beyond reach (or within reach), etc. You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself. ↗

— Milan Kundera

#art

If I didn't have my parents to think about I'd have given in my notice a long time ago, I'd have gone up to the boss and told him just what I think, tell him everything I would, let him know just what I feel. He'd fall right off his desk! And it's a funny sort of business to be sitting up there at your desk, talking down at your subordinates from up there, especially when you have to go right up close because the boss is hard of hearing. ↗

— Franz Kafka

#metamorphosis #business

Why does loving somebody mean you have to hurt them just as much? I mean if that’s the way it goes, what’s the point of loving someone? Why the hell does it have to be like that? ↗

— Haruki Murakami

#love #love

Things change every day, Mr Nakata. With each new dawn it's not the same world as the day before. And you're not the same person you were, either. ↗

— Haruki Murakami

#change

And when the storm is over, you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of a storm, you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what the storm is about ↗

— Haruki Murakami

#inspirational #kafka-on-the-shore #inspirational

I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow on the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe. ~quoting Franz Kafka ↗

— Alberto Manguel

#death

Nothing expresses Kafka’s innermost sense of self more profoundly than his lapidary definition of “writing as a form of prayer”: he was a writer. Not a man who wrote, but one to whom writing was the only form of being, the only means of defying death in life. ↗

— Ernst Pawel

#kafka #life #writers #writing #death

This brings me back to the image of Kafka standing before a fish in the Berlin aquarium, a fish on which his gaze fell in a newly found peace after he decided not to eat animals. Kafka recognized that fish as a member of his invisible family- not as his equal, of course, but as another being that was his concern. ↗

— Jonathan Safran Foer

#kafka #veganism #vegetarianism #equality

Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it at every moment. ↗

— Franz Kafka

#franz-kafka #heaven #kafka #life #moment