Conversations With Kafka Quotes

Conversations bore me, to visit people bores me, the sorrows and joys of my relatives bore me to my soul.

Out of Dostoevsky: Kafka. Out of Tolstoy: Margaret Mitchell. (in conversation, explaining his dislike for Tolstoy)

I hate everything that does not relate to literature, conversations bore me (even when they relate to literature), to visit people bores me, the joys and sorrows of my relatives bore me to my soul. Conversation takes the importance, the seriousness, the truth, out of everything I think.

Before the Law stands a doorkeeper on guard. To this doorkeeper there comes a man from the country who begs for admittance to the Law. But the doorkeeper says that he cannot admit the man at the moment. The man, on reflection, asks if he will be allowed, then, to enter later. 'It is possible,' answers the doorkeeper, 'but not at this moment.' Since the door leading into the Law stands open as usual and the doorkeeper steps to one side, the man bends down to peer through the entrance. When the doorkeeper sees that, he laughs and says: 'If you are so strongly tempted, try to get in without my permission. But note that I am powerful. And I am only the lowest doorkeeper. From hall to hall keepers stand at every door, one more powerful than the other. Even the third of these has an aspect that even I cannot bear to look at.' These are difficulties which the man from the country has not expected to meet, the Law, he thinks, should be accessible to every man and at all times, but when he looks more closely at the doorkeeper in his furred robe, with his huge pointed nose and long, thin, Tartar beard, he decides that he had better wait until he gets permission to enter. The doorkeeper gives him a stool and lets him sit down at the side of the door. There he sits waiting for days and years. He makes many attempts to be allowed in and wearies the doorkeeper with his importunity. The doorkeeper often engages him in brief conversation, asking him about his home and about other matters, but the questions are put quite impersonally, as great men put questions, and always conclude with the statement that the man cannot be allowed to enter yet. The man, who has equipped himself with many things for his journey, parts with all he has, however valuable, in the hope of bribing the doorkeeper. The doorkeeper accepts it all, saying, however, as he takes each gift: 'I take this only to keep you from feeling that you have left something undone.' During all these long years the man watches the doorkeeper almost incessantly. He forgets about the other doorkeepers, and this one seems to him the only barrier between himself and the Law. In the first years he curses his evil fate aloud; later, as he grows old, he only mutters to himself. He grows childish, and since in his prolonged watch he has learned to know even the fleas in the doorkeeper's fur collar, he begs the very fleas to help him and to persuade the doorkeeper to change his mind. Finally his eyes grow dim and he does not know whether the world is really darkening around him or whether his eyes are only deceiving him. But in the darkness he can now perceive a radiance that streams immortally from the door of the Law. Now his life is drawing to a close. Before he dies, all that he has experienced during the whole time of his sojourn condenses in his mind into one question, which he has never yet put to the doorkeeper. He beckons the doorkeeper, since he can no longer raise his stiffening body. The doorkeeper has to bend far down to hear him, for the difference in size between them has increased very much to the man's disadvantage. 'What do you want to know now?' asks the doorkeeper, 'you are insatiable.' 'Everyone strives to attain the Law,' answers the man, 'how does it come about, then, that in all these years no one has come seeking admittance but me?' The doorkeeper perceives that the man is at the end of his strength and that his hearing is failing, so he bellows in his ear: 'No one but you could gain admittance through this door, since this door was intended only for you. I am now going to shut it.

The difficulties (which other people surely find incredible) I have in speaking to people arise from the fact that my thinking, or rather the content of my consciousness, is entirely nebulous, that I remain undisturbed by this, so far as it concerns only myself, and am even occasionally self-satisfied; yet conversation with people demands pointedness, solidity, and sustained coherence, qualities not to be found in me. No one will want to lie in clouds of mist with me, and even if someone did, I couldn’t expel the mist from my head; when two people come together it dissolves of itself and is nothing.

Nakata never went into these conversations with cats expecting to be able to easily communicate everything. You have to anticipate a few problems when cats and humans try to speak to each other.

Words prepare the way for deeds to come, detonate future explosions.

I read because the women that I liked when I was a teenager lived down in Greenwich Village and they all had those black clothes. The Jules Feiffer women with the black leather bags and the blonde hair and the silver earrings and they all had read Proust and Kafka and Nietzche. And so when I said, ‘No, the only thing I’ve ever read were two books by Mickey Spillane,’ they would look at their watch and I was out. So in order to be able to carry on a conversation with these women who I thought were so beautiful and fascinating, I had to read. So I read. But it wasn’t something I did out of love. I did it out of lust.

It is literature,’ said Kafka smiling. ‘Flight from reality.’ ‘So poetry is lies?’ ‘No. Poetry is a condensate, an essence. Literature, on the other hand, is a relaxation, a means of pleasure which alleviates the unconscious life, a narcotic.’ ‘And poetry?’ ‘Poetry is exactly the opposite. Poetry is an awakening.’ ‘So poetry tends towards religion.’ 'I would not say that. But certainly to prayer.

When you read The Arabian Nights you accept Islam. You accept the fables woven by generations as if they were by one single author or, better still, as if they had no author. And in fact they have one and none. Something so worked on, so polished by generations is no longer associated with and individual. In Kafka's case, it's possible that his fables are now part of human memory. What happened to Quixote could happen to to them. Let's say that all the copies of Quixote, in Spanish and in translation, were lost. The figure of Don Quixote would remain in human memory. I think that the idea of a frightening trial that goes on forever, which is at the core of The Castle and The Trial (both books that Kafka, of course, never wanted to publish because he knew they were unfinished), is now grown infinite, is now part of human memory and can now be rewritten under different titles and feature different circumstances. Kafka's work now forms a part of human memory.

Only those burdened with a common affliction understand each other. Thanks to their affliction they constitute a circle and provide each other mutual support. They glide along the inner borders of their circle, make way for or jostle one another gently in the crowd... There exists not the shadow of a thought to give the comforter an advantage over the comforted. Thus their conversations consist only of a coming-together of their imaginations, outpourings of wishes from one upon the other... Sometimes they will unite in faith and, their heads together, look up into the unending reaches of the sky. Recognition of their situation shows itself, however, only when they bow down their heads in common and the common hammer descends upon them.

Who is it? Who walks under the trees of the quay? Who is quite lost? Who is past saving? Over whose grave does the grass grow? Dreams have arrived, upstream they came. They came, they climb up the walls of the quay on a ladder. One stops makes conversation with them, they know a number of things, but what they don’t know is where they come from. It is quite warm this autumn evening. They turn toward the river and raise their arms. Why do you raise your amrs instead of clasping us in them?

Kafka’s short story ‘Judgement’.

The only definite thing is suffering.

لا توجد قصص خرافية بلا دم. كل قصة خرافية تأتي من أعماق الدم والخوف. كل القصص الخرافية متشابهة في هذا. يختلف السطح فقط.

إن الشاعر دائماً أصغر وأضعف من المعدّل الاجتماعي. لهذا فهو يشعر بوطأة الوجود الدنيوي بشكل أكثر تركيزاً وقوة من بقية الناس.

الأمر الفظيع حول الحرب هو ذوبان كل الحقائق والأعراف الموجودة. الحيواني والجسدي ينموان تماماً ويخنقان كل ما هو روحي مثل السرطان.

Shape I may take, converse I may, but neither god nor Buddha am I, rather an insensate being whose heart thus differs from that of man.

Would you call it a conversation if the other person is silent and, to keep up the appearance of a conversation, you try to substitute for him, and so imitate him, and so parody him, and so parody yourself.

Tired but happy. There is nothing more beautiful than some straightforward, concrete, generally useful trade...Intellectual labor tears a man out of human society. A craft, on the other hand, leads him towards men. What a pity I can no longer work in the workshop or in the garden.

She thinks, ‘I’m telling him who I am. He’s interested in who I am.’ That is true, but I am curious about who she is because I want to fuck her. I don’t need all of this great interest in Kafka and Velazquez. Having this conversation with her, I am thinking, how much more am I going to have to go through? Three hours? Four? Will I go as far as eight hours? Twenty minutes into the veiling and already I’m wondering, what does any of this have to do with her skin and how she carries herself? The French art of being flirtatious is of no interest to me. The savage urge is. No, this is not seduction. This is comedy. It is the comedy of creating a connection that is not the connection – created unartificially by lust. This is the instant conventionalizing, the giving us something in common on the spot, the trying to transform lust into something socially appropriate.

You see us as insolent conspirators. An odd sort of conspirators. Admittedly you are a prominent subject of our conversations, as you have been of our thoughts since the very beginning, however, we do not come together with the intention of plotting against you, but rather to talk through with one another - in every detail, from all angles, at every oppurtunity, from near and far, under stress, in jest, in sincerity, with love, defiance, anger, revulsion, resignation, guilt, with all the strenght of our heads and hearts - that terrible trial that hangs over us and separates us from you, a trial in which you always claim the role of judge although, at least for the most part, you are just as weak and blinded as we are.

At one chew per second, the Fletcherizing of a single bite of shallot would take more than ten minutes. Supper conversation presented a challenge. “Horace Fletcher came for a quiet dinner, sufficiently chewed,” wrote the financier William Forbes in his journal from 1906. Woe befall the non-Fletcherizer forced to endure what historian Margaret Barnett called “the tense and awful silence which . . . accompanies their excruciating tortures of mastication.” Nutrition faddist John Harvey Kellogg, whose sanatorium briefly embraced Fletcherism,* tried to reenliven mealtimes by hiring a quartette to sing “The Chewing Song,”† an original Kellogg composition, while diners grimly toiled. I searched in vain for film footage, but Barnett was probably correct in assuming that “Fletcherites at table were not an attractive sight.” Franz Kafka’s father, she reports, “hid behind a newspaper at dinnertime to avoid watching the writer Fletcherize.

Someone pumps sentences into my brain, long-forgotten images from childhood; meaningless objects and conversations peel layers from my heart. I am again a river faun, paralyzed by longing for a river nymph. I walk through wolframic space, my mouth and nose threaded with wire, and whenever I deviate from my course, I feel a sharp pain in my jaws.

Crossing a rainswept square, apropos of something or other, Kafka tells Janouch: 'Life is as infinitely great and profound as the immensity of the stars above us. One can only look at it through the narrow keyhole of one's personal existence. But through it one perceives more than one can see. So above all one must keep the keyhole clean.

Franz Kafka loves gestures, and is therefore economical of them. A gesture of his is not an accompaniment of speech, duplicating the words, but as it were a word from an independent language of movement, a means of communication, thus in no way an involuntary reflex, but a deliberate expression of intention.

You describe the poet as a great and wonderful man whose feet are on the ground, while his head disappears in the clouds. Of course, that is a perfectly ordinary image drawn within the intellectual framework of lower-middle-class convention. It is an illusion based on wish fulfillment, which has nothing in common with reality. In fact, the poet is always much smaller and weaker than the social average. Therefore he feels the burden of earthly existence much more intensely and strongly than other men. For him personally his song is only a scream. Art for the artist is only suffering, through which he releases himself for further suffering. He is not a giant, but only a more or less brightly plumaged bird in the cage of his existence.

He's not impertinent," Kafka said gently, and looked at me with dark, sad eyes. "He's only afraid. So he's unjust. Fear for one's daily bread destroys one's character. That's what life is like.

The world is opening out but we are driven into narrow defiles of paper. The only certainty is the chair one sits on. We live in straight lines, yet every man is in fact a labyrinth. Writing desks are beds of Procrustes. Yet we are not antique heroes. So, despite our pain, all we are is tragic comedians.

Yet a forced gaiety is much sadder than an openly acknowledged sorrow." "Quite true. Yet sorrow has no prospects. And all that matters is prospects, hope, going forward. There is danger only in the narrow, restricted moment. Behind it lies the abyss. If one overcomes it, everything is different. Only the moment counts. It determines life.

Poetry is disease," said Kafka. "Yet one does not get well by suppressing the fever. On the contrary! It's heat purifies and illuminates.

The difficulties I have with speaking, certainly incredible to other people, stem from the fact that my thinking or rather the contents of my consciousness are completely foggy, that as far as it is a question of myself alone, I rest in them undisturbed and sometimes self-satisfied, but that a human conversation requires sharpening, consolidation and continuous coherence, things that do not exist in me. No one will want to lie with me in clouds of fog and even if he wanted to, I cannot drive the fog out of my forehead, between two people it dissipates and is nothing.

Kafka loved the streets, palaces, gardens and churches of the city where he was born. He looked with joyful interest through the pages of all the books on the antiquities of Prague which I brought to him in his office. His eyes and hands literally caressed the pages of such publications, though he had read them all long before I placed them on his desk. His eyes shone with the look of a passionate collector. The past was for him not some historically dead collector's piece, but a supple instrument of knowledge, a bridge to today.

Our superhuman greed and vanity, the hubris of our will to power. We struggle to achieve values which are not really values at all, in order to destroy things on which our whole existence as human beings depends. Therein lies a confusion which drags us into the mire and destroys us.

Nothing sticks so fast in the mind as a groundless sense of guilt, because - since it has no real foundation - one cannot eliminate it by any form of repentance or redemption.

Do you know about Poe's Life?" "I only know what I've been told by Kampf. It seems that Poe was a notorious drunkard." Kafka frowned. "Poe was ill. He was a poor devil who had no defenses against the world. So he fled into drunkenness. Imagination only served him as a crutch. He wrote tales of mystery to make himself at home in the world. That's perfectly natural. Imagination has fewer pitfalls than reality does.

Do you mean that Truth is always closed to us?" Kafka was silent...I pressed him further: 'But can we grasp it?" 'We experience it,' said Kafka, in a slightly troubled voice. 'The fact, to which we give different names, and which we try to apprehend by various processes of thought, pervades our veins, our nerves, our senses. It is within us. For that reason perhaps it's invisible. What we can really grasp is the mystery, the darkness. God dwells in it. And this is a good thing, because without the protecting darkness, we should try to overcome God. That is man's nature. The son dethrones the Father. So God must remain hidden in darkness. And because man cannot reach him, he attacks at least the darkness which surrounds the divine. He throws burning brands into the icy night. But the night is elastic like rubber. It throws them back. And by doing so it endures. The only darkness which passes away is that of the human spirit - the light and shadow of the drop of water.

Man is not only a work of nature but is also his own artifact, a daemon who continually breaks through the established frontiers and makes visible what was hitherto in darkness.

Do you remember the old Jewish quarter?" "As a matter of fact, I came when it had already disappeared...In us all it still lives - the dark corners, the secret alleys, shuttered windows, squalid courtyards, rowdy pubs, and sinister inns. We walk through the broad streets of the newly built town. But our steps and our glances are uncertain. Inside we tremble just as before in the ancient streets of our misery. Our heart knows nothing of the slum clearance which has been achieved. The unhealthy old Jewish town within us is far more real than the new hygienic town around us. With out eyes open we walk through a dream: ourselves only a ghost of a vanished age.

Genuine and lasting strength consists in bearing things.

What one writes is only the ashes of one’s experience.

Both Bennett and Kafka understand that, no matter how absurd their rituals, pronunciations, clothes might appear to be, the ruling class are unembarrassable; that is not because there is a special code which only they understand — there is no code, precisely — but that whatever they do is alright, because it is THEM doing it. Conversely, if you are not of the “in-crowd”, nothing you can do could EVER be right; you are a priori guilty.

تبدو كل نصيحة في جوهرها خيانة. إنها تراجع جبان عن مواجهة المستقبل، الذي هو محك لحاضرنا.

ما يولد يعيش فقط. كل شيء آخر تبديد للزمن: الأدب لا يملك تبريراً للوجود.

العمل الفكري الشاق يمزّق الإنسان من المجتمع الإنساني.

يواجه كيركيغارد المشكلة، أمّا من أجل أن يتمتع بالحياة بشكل جمالي أو لكي يمارسها على نحو أخلاقي. لكن هذا يبدو لي إفصاحاً زائفاً عن المسألة. إن (إما \ أو) موجودة فقط في رأس سورين كيركيغارد. في الواقع يمكن للمرء أن يحقق متعة جمالية من الحياة كنتيجة للتجربة الأخلاقية المتواضعة.

كما ينتشر الفيضان أوسع فأوسع، يصبح الماء ضحلاً ووسخاً. الثورة تتبخر، وتترك وراءها وحل بيروقراطية جديدة. قيود البشرية المعذّبة صُنِعت من شريط أحمر.

أن نرى التاريخ كتراكم للأحداث هو أمر لا معنى له. ما يهم هو مغزى الأحداث. لكننا لن نعثر على ذلك في الصحف. سنكتشفه في الإيمان فقط، في إضفاء الموضوعية على ما يبدو عرضياً.

التاريخ صُنِع من أخطاء وبطولات كل لحظة تافهة. إذا ما ألقيت حصاة في نهر سوف تنتج سلسلة من التموجات. لكن أغلب الناس يعيشون دون أن يدركوا مسؤولياتهم التي تمتد ما وراء ذواتهم. وأعتقد أن ذلك هو أصل بؤسنا.

Je ne peux pas me souvenir que tu m'aies insulté personnellement, avec des insultes explicites. Il faut dire que ce n'était pas nécessaire, tu avais tant d'autres moyens, et d'ailleurs, dans les conversations chez nous, et surtout au commerce, les insultes crépitaient autour de moi en telles masses que, petit garçon, j'en étais tout abasourdi, n'ayant aucune possibilité de ne pas me sentir visé par elles, car les gens que tu insultais n'étaient sûrement pas plus détestables que moi, et tu n'étais sûrement pas plus insatisfait d'eux que de moi.

One cannot break one’s chains when there are no chains to be seen. One’s imprisonment is therefore organized as a perfectly ordinary, not over-comfortable form of daily life. Everything looks as if it were made of solid, lasting stuff. But on the contrary it is a life in which one is falling towards an abyss. It isn’t visible. But if one closes one’s eyes, one can hear its rush and roar.

The stories in this collection represent the early results of Hrabal’s discovery of what he came to call “total realism,” the realization that the ordinary events of everyday life can be as magical as surrealism, and that straightforward accounts of people at work and in conversation can reveal more about who they are and the world they live in than attempts to portray their inner lives.

Svako živi iza rešetaka koje nosi sa sobom. Zato se sada tako mnogo piše o životinjama. To je izraz čežnje za slobodnim, prirodnim životom. No, prirodni život za čoveka jeste ljudski život. To se, ipak, ne vidi. Nećemo da vidimo. Ljudska egzistencija je odveć tegobna, zato bismo da je se otarasimo, barem u fantaziji. [...] Vraćamo se životinji. To je znatno prostije od ljudske egzistencije. Dobro ušuškani usred stada, marširamo ulicama gradova na posao, na valove i u zadovoljstva. To je život strogo kao u kancelariji. Nema čuda, nego jedino uputstva za upotrebu, obrasci i propisi. Bojimo se slobode i odgovornosti. Stoga se radije gušimo iza rešetaka koje čak i sami popravljamo." (Kafka o "Preobražaju")

Tom prilikom Kafka mi reče: "Vi opisujete pesnika kao nekog čudesno velikog čoveka čije noge su na zemlji dok mu glava nestaje u oblacima. To je, prirodno, sasvim uobičajena slika u okviru malograđanskih konvencionalnih predstava. To je iluzija, proizišla iz skrivenih želja, a koja nema ničeg zajedničkog sa stvarnošću. U stvarnosti je pesnik uvek manji i slabiji od društvenog proseka. Otuda on oseća teret zemaljskog postojanja intenzivnije i jače nego drugi ljudi. Njegova pesma je za njega samo krik. Umetnost je za umetnika patnja putem koje on sebe oslobađa za novu patnju. On nije nikakav div, nego je tek više ili manje živopisna ptica u kavezu svoje egzistencije.

الشاعر لديه مهمة قيادة المنعزلين والفانين إلى الحياة الأبدية، وإذعان كل ما هو عرضي إلى الشريعة. الشاعر لديه رسالة نبوية.