Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafkawas a German-language writer of novels and short stories who is widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His work, which fuses elements of realism and the fantastic, typically features isolated protagonists faced by bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible social-bureaucratic powers, and has been interpreted as exploring themes of alienation, existential anxiety, guilt, and absurdity. His best known works include "Die Verwandlung", Der Process, and Das Schloss. The term Kafkaesque has entered the English...
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth3 July 1883
CityPrague, Czech Republic
If this is what you came for, then I didn't send for you. Kafka (note to himself in journal)
It would have been so pointless to kill himself that, even if he had wanted to, the pointlessness would have made him unable.
This inescapable duty to observe oneself: if someone else is observing me, naturally I have to observe myself too; if none observe me, I have to observe myself all the closer.
There are questions we could not get past if we were not set free from them by our very nature.
If I shall exist eternally, how shall I exist tomorrow?
If something good has lost its way into you, it will make its escape overnight. I know you.
If you become involved with me, you will be throwing yourself into the abyss.
One must fight to get to the top, especially if one starts at the bottom.
Isn't it only natural to leave a place where one is so bitterly hated?...The heroism involved in staying put in spite of it all is the heroism of a cockroach, which also won't be driven out of the bathroom.
Everything you say is boring and incomprehensible," she said, "but that alone doesn't make it true
You are free and that is why you are lost
Persons who write a 10,000 word document and call it a brief
One must not cheat anybody, not even the world of one's triumph.
No people sing with such pure voices as those that live in deepest hell; what we take for the song of angels is their song.