Letters to Felice? Quotes by Franz Kafka
“You are at once both the quiet and the confusion of my heart; imagine my heartbeat when you are in this state.”
“It certainly was not my intention to make you suffer, yet i have done so; obviously it never will be my intention to make you suffer, yet I shall always do so.”
“Nothing unites two people so completely, especially if, like you and me, all they have is words.”
“Each of us has his own way of emerging from the underworld, mine is by writing. That's why the only way I can keep going, if at all, is by writing, not through rest and sleep. I am far more likely to achieve peace of mind through writing than the capacity to write through peace.”
“One has either to take people as they are, or leave them as they are. One cannot change them, one can merely disturb their balance. A human being, after all, is not made up of single pieces, from which a single piece can be taken out and replaced by something else.”
“You will get to know me better; there are still a number of horrible recesses in me that you don’t know.”
“No, I didn't imagine my being alone with you the way you do. If I want the impossible, I want it in its entirety. Entirely alone, dearest, I wanted us to be entirely alone on this earth, entirely alone under the sky, and to lead my life, my life that is yours, without distraction and with complete concentration, in you.”
“The fact that no one knows where I am is my only happiness. If only I could prolong this forever! It would be far more just than death. I am empty and futile in every corner of my being, even in my unhappiness.”
“But when I want to draw close to someone, and fully commit myself, then my misery is assured. Then I am nothing, and what can I do with nothingness? I must admit that your letter this morning (by the afternoon it had changed) arrived at just the right moment; I was in need of those very words.”
“I am not well; I could have built the Pyramids with the effort it takes me to cling on to life and reason.”
“I have no memory for things I have learned, nor things I have read, nor things experienced or heard, neither for people nor events; I feel that I have experienced nothing, learned nothing, that I actually know less than the average schoolboy, and that what I do know is superficial, and that every second question is beyond me. I am incapable of thinking deliberately; my thoughts run into a wall. I can grasp the essence of things in isolation, but I am quite incapable of coherent, unbroken thinking. I can’t even tell a story properly; in fact, I can scarcely talk.”
“Once again I have told you so little, and have asked no questions, and once again I must close. But not a single answer and, even more certainly, not a single question shall be lost. There exists some kind of sorcery by which two people, without seeing each other, without talking to each other, can at least discover the greater part about each other’s past, literally in a flash, without having to tell each other all and everything; but this, after all, is almost an instrument of Black Magic (without seeming to be) which, although never without reward, one would certainly never resort to with impunity. Therefore I won’t say it, unless you guess it first. It is terribly short, like all magic formulas. Farewell, and let me reinforce this greeting by lingering over your hand.
“I read the letter once, put it aside, and read it again; I pick up a file but am really only reading your letter; I am with the typist, to whom I am supposed to dictate, and again your letter slowly slides through my fingers and I have begun to draw it out of my pocket when people ask me something and I know perfectly well I should not be thinking of your letter now, yet that thought is all that occurs to me—but after all that I am as hungry as before, as restless as before, and once again the door starts swinging merrily, as though the man with the letter were about to appear again. That is what you call the “little pleasure” your letters give me.”
“I mustn't look at you too much, or I won't be able to take my eyes off you at all.”
“I am so miserable, there are so many questions, I can see no way out and am so wretched and feeble that I could lie forever on the sofa and keep opening and closing my eyes without knowing the difference.”
“First of all, I am delighted that you are a vegetarian at heart. I don’t like strict vegetarians all that much, because I too am almost a vegetarian, and see nothing particularly likable about it, just something natural, and those who are good vegetarians in their hearts, but, for reasons of health, from indifference, or simply because they underrate food as such, eat meat or whatever happens to be on the table, casually, with their left hand, so to speak, these are the ones I like.”
“one must not prostrate oneself before the minor impossibilities, otherwise the major impossibilities would never come into view.”
“My powers of reasoning are incredibly limited; to sense the development in the results, that I can do, but to ascend from the development of the results or step by step to reconstruction it from the results, that is not given to me. It is though as I were falling down upon these things, and caught sight of them only in the confusion of my fall.”
“There are times when I am convinced I am unfit for any human relationship.”