Franz Kafka Love Quotes

You are the knife I turn inside myself; that is love. That, my dear, is love.

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.

Yours (now I'm even losing my name - it was getting shorter and shorter all the time and is now: Yours)

May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.

I can’t think of any greater happiness than to be with you all the time, without interruption, endlessly, even though I feel that here in this world there’s no undisturbed place for our love, neither in the village nor anywhere else; and I dream of a grave, deep and narrow, where we could clasp each other in our arms as with clamps, and I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more.

Love is a drama of contradictions.

You are at once both the quiet and the confusion of my heart; imagine my heartbeat when you are in this state.

Every thing you love is very likely to be lost, but in the end, love will return in a different way.

I long for you; I who usually longs without longing, as though I am unconscious and absorbed in neutrality and apathy, really, utterly long for every bit of you.

Dear Milena, I wish the world were ending tomorrow. Then I could take the next train, arrive at your doorstep in Vienna, and say: “Come with me, Milena. We are going to love each other without scruples or fear or restraint. Because the world is ending tomorrow.” Perhaps we don’t love unreasonably because we think we have time, or have to reckon with time. But what if we don't have time? Or what if time, as we know it, is irrelevant? Ah, if only the world were ending tomorrow. We could help each other very much.

I can love only what I can place so high above me that I cannot reach it.

We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

Should I be grateful or should I curse the fact that despite all misfortune I can still feel love, an unearthly love but still for earthly objects.

Milena, if a million loved you, I am one of them, and if one loved you, it was me, if no one loved you then know that I am dead.

The books we need are of the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that makes us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, lost in a forest remote from all human habitation.

Nor is it perhaps really love when I say that for me you are the most beloved; In this love you are like a knife, with which I explore myself.

He thought back on his family with deep emotion and love. His conviction that he would have to disappear was, if possible, even firmer than his sister's. He remained in this state of empty and peaceful reflection until the tower clock struck three in the morning. He still saw that outside the window everything was beginning to grow light. Then, without his consent, his head sank down to the floor, and from his nostrils streamed his last weak breath.

When one is alone, imperfection must be endured every minute of the day; a couple, however, does not have to put up with it. Aren’t our eyes made to be torn out, and our hearts for the same purpose? At the same time it’s really not that bad; that’s an exaggeration and a lie, everything is exaggeration, the only truth is longing. But even the truth of longing is not so much its own truth; it’s really an expression for everything else, which is a lie. This sounds crazy and distorted, but it’s true. Moreover, perhaps it isn’t love when I say you are what I love the most - you are the knife I turn inside myself, this is love. This, my dear, is love.

We are as forlorn as children lost in the woods. When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours. And if I were to cast myself down before you and weep and tell you, what more would you know about me than you know about Hell when someone tells you it is hot and dreadful? For that reason alone we human beings ought to stand before one another as reverently, as reflectively, as lovingly, as we would before the entrance to Hell.

It occurs to me that I really can't remember your face in any precise detail. Only the way you walked away through the tables in the café, your figure, your dress, that I still see.

I am fond of lovers but I cannot love, I am too far away, am banished,

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.

And actually it is not you at all I love, but rather the existence you have bestowed on me

you are the knife i turn inside myself; that is love, that, my dear, is love

By your side I’m most quiet and most unquiet, most inhibited and most free.

Always only the desire to die and the not-yet-yielding; this alone is love.

In argument similes are like songs in love; they describe much, but prove nothing.

Franz Kafka is Dead He died in a tree from which he wouldn't come down. "Come down!" they cried to him. "Come down! Come down!" Silence filled the night, and the night filled the silence, while they waited for Kafka to speak. "I can't," he finally said, with a note of wistfulness. "Why?" they cried. Stars spilled across the black sky. "Because then you'll stop asking for me." The people whispered and nodded among themselves. They put their arms around each other, and touched their children's hair. They took off their hats and raised them to the small, sickly man with the ears of a strange animal, sitting in his black velvet suit in the dark tree. Then they turned and started for home under the canopy of leaves. Children were carried on their fathers' shoulders, sleepy from having been taken to see who wrote his books on pieces of bark he tore off the tree from which he refused to come down. In his delicate, beautiful, illegible handwriting. And they admired those books, and they admired his will and stamina. After all: who doesn't wish to make a spectacle of his loneliness? One by one families broke off with a good night and a squeeze of the hands, suddenly grateful for the company of neighbors. Doors closed to warm houses. Candles were lit in windows. Far off, in his perch in the trees , Kafka listened to it all: the rustle of the clothes being dropped to the floor, or lips fluttering along naked shoulders, beds creaking along the weight of tenderness. It all caught in the delicate pointed shells of his ears and rolled like pinballs through the great hall of his mind. That night a freezing wind blew in. When the children woke up, they went to the window and found the world encased in ice. One child, the smallest, shrieked out in delight and her cry tore through the silence and exploded the ice of a giant oak tree. The world shone. They found him frozen on the ground like a bird. It's said that when they put their ears to the shell of his ears, they could hear themselves.

If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skulls, then why do we read it? Good God, we also would be happy if we had no books and such books that make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. What we must have are those books that come on us like ill fortune, like the death of one we love better than ourselves, like suicide. A book must be an ice axe to break the sea frozen inside us. 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 ax for the frozen sea within us.

People keep themselves at a tolerable height above an infernal abyss toward which they gravitate only by putting out all their strength and lovingly helping one another. They are tied together by ropes, and it's bad enough when the ropes around an individual loosen and he drops somewhat lower than the others into empty space; ghastly when the ropes break and he falls. That's why we should cling to the others.

Auch ist es vielleicht nicht eigentlich Liebe wenn ich sage, daß Du mir das Liebste bist; Liebe ist, dass Du mir das Messer bist, mit dem ich in mir wühle. An Milena Jesenska (14. September 1920)

In this love you are like a knife with which I explore myself.

Our winters are very long here, very long and very monotonous. But we don't complain about it downstairs, we're shielded against the winter. Oh, spring does come eventually, and summer, and they last for a while, but now, looking back, spring and summer seem too short, as if they were not much more than a couple of days, and even on those days, no matter how lovely the day, it still snows occasionally.

You cannot love me, much as you would like; you are unhappily in love with your love for me, but your love for me is not in love with you.

All the love in the world is useless when there is a total lack of understanding.

It is as if I were made of stone, as if I were my own tombstone, there is no loophole for doubt or for faith, for love or repugnance, for courage or anxiety, in particular or in general, only a vague hope lives on, but no better than the inscriptions on tombstones.

And actually it's not at all you I love, but rather the existence you have bestowed on me.

Altogether, 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 to 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 suicide. A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe.

What is love? After all, it is quite simple. Love is everything which enhances, widens, and enriches our life. In its heights and in its depths. Love has as few problems as a motor-car. The only problems are the driver, the passengers, and the road.

All the love in the world in the world is useless when there is a total lack of understanding.

Because I love you (you see, I do love you, you dimwit, my love engulfs you the way the sea loves a tiny pebble on its bed-and may I be the pebble with you, heaven permitting)

I always succeed in not being jealous but only sometimes in comprehending the pointlessness of jealousy.

I am a very unhappy human being and you, dearest, simply had to be summoned to create an equilibrium for all this misery.

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? (...) We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

I don't think that anyone outside Paris can understand love and murder as we do. But Emile loves Paris, and loving Paris is a murderous education. ("Anthropology: What Is Lost In Rotation")

I look a girl in the eye and it was a very long love story with thunder and kisses and lightning. I live fast.

Adevăratul motiv al temerilor mele – nu există ceva mai cumplit de spus şi nici de auzit – este că nu te voi putea poseda niciodată.

All right then, I’ll be mad at you on this score, which incidentally is no great misfortune, as things balance out quite well if there’s a little anger for you lurking in one corner of my heart.

I am as I am, and that's all there is to it, I can hardly take a pair of scissors to myself, and cut out a different person...

I'm tired, can't think of anything and want only to lay my face in your lap, feel your hand on my head and remain like that for through all eternity.

Moreover, perhaps it isn’t love when I say you are what I love the most – you are the knife I turn inside myself, this is love. This, my dear, is love.

Yetkin, ama acı veren bir büyü ile buradasınız! Benim burada olduğum gibi, daha da elle tutulur biçimde; ben neredeysem siz de oradasınız, benim olduğum kadar, daha da belirli.

Write to me only once a week, so that your letter arrives on Sunday — for I cannot endure your daily letters, I am incapable of enduring them. For instance, I answer one of your letters, then lie in bed in apparent calm, but my heart beats through my entire body and is conscious only of you. I belong to you

When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours? And if I were to cast myself down before you and weep and tell you, what more would you know about me than you know about Hell when someone tells you it is hot and dreadful? For that reason alone we human beings ought to stand before one another as reverently, as reflectively, as lovingly, as we would before the entrance to Hell.

I don't know,' I cried without being heard, 'I do not know, If nobody comes, then nobody comes. I've done nobody any harm, nobody's done me any harm, but nobody will help me. A pack of nobodies. Yet that isn't all true. Only, that nobody helps me - a pack of nobodies would be rather fine, on the other hand. I'd love to go on an excursion - why not? - with a pack of nobodies. Into the mountains, of course, where else? How these nobodies jostle each other, all these lifted arms linked together, these numberless feet treading so close! Of course they are all in dress suits. We go so gaily, the wind blows through us and the gaps in our company. Our throats swell and are free in the mountains! It's a wonder that we don't burst into song.

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.

The gesture of rejection with which I was forever met did not mean: 'I do not love you,' but: 'You cannot love me, much as you would like; you are unhappily in love with your love for me, but your love for me is not in love with you.' It is consequently incorrect to say that I have known the words, 'I love you'; I have known only the expectant stillness that should have been broken by my 'I love you,' that is all that I have known, nothing more.

My health is only just good enough for myself alone, not good enough for marriage, let alone fatherhood. Yet when I read your letter, I feel I could overlook even what cannot possibly be overlooked.

The hardest bones, containing the richest marrow, can be conquered only by a united crushing of all the teeth of all dogs. That of course is only a figure of speech and exaggerated; if all teeth were but ready they would not need even to bite, the bones would crack themselves and the marrow would be freely accessible to the feeblest of dogs. If I remain faithful to this metaphor, then the goal of my aims, my questions, my inquiries, appears monstrous, it is true. For I want to compel all dogs thus to assemble together, I want the bones to crack open under the pressure of their collective preparedness, and then I want to dismiss them to the ordinary life they love, while all by myself, quite alone, I lap up the marrow. That sounds monstrous, almost as if I wanted to feed on the marrow, not merely of bone, but of the whole canine race itself. But it is only a metaphor. The marrow that I am discussing here is no food; on the contrary, it is a poison.

Now, before I go to sleep because it is your wish and because it is so simple, I will whisper in your ear how much I love you

However, even this would not have helped me had I not remembered that I was loved by a girl with a black velvet ribbon around her neck, if not passionately, at least faithfully.

You are the knife I turn inside myself; that is love. That, my dear, is love” - Letters to Milena

When the little mouse, which was loved as none other was in the mouse-world, got into a trap one night and with a shrill scream forfeited its life for the sight of the bacon, all the mice in the district, in their holes were overcome by trembling and shaking; with eyes blinking uncontrollably they gazed at each other one by one, while their tails scraped the ground busily and senselessly. Then they came out, hesitantly, pushing one another, all drawn towards the scene of death. There it lay, the dear little mouse, its neck caught in the deadly iron, the little pink legs drawn up, and now stiff the feeble body that would so well have deserved a scrap of bacon. The parents stood beside it and eyed their child's remains.

Why then do you fear love in particular more than earthly existence in general?” Kafka replied as if from an astral distance: “You write: ‘Why be more afraid of love than of other things in life?’ And just before that: ‘I experienced the intermittently divine for the first time, and more frequently than elsewhere, in love.’ If you conjoin these two sentences, it’s as if you had said: ‘Why not fear every bush in the same way that you fear the burning bush?

I asked myself at the time: how is it that she is not astonished at herself, that she keeps her mouth closed, and expresses nothing of any wonderment?

İki saatlik yaşam iki sayfalık bir yazıdan daha iyidir diye emin olmayın. Yazı yoksuldur ama daha temizdir.

Non spaventarti se senti le mie labbra sul collo, non volevo baciarti, è soltanto amore impacciato.

Milena lütfen bana yardım edin! Söyleyebildiklerimden daha da fazlasını anlamaya çalışın.

For me you took on the enigmatic quality that all tyrants have whose rights are based on their person and not on reason. At least so it seemed to me.

Cara signora Milena, la giornata è molto breve, con Lei e soltanto con qualche altra inezia è bell'e passata e terminata. E' molto se rimane un po' di tempo per scrivere alla vera Milena perché quella ancor più vera era qui tutto il giorno nella camera, sul balcone, nelle nuvole.

We are as forlorn as children lost in the wood. When you stand before me and look at me, what do you know of the griefs within me and what do I know of yours? And if I were to cast myself down before you and tell you, what more would you know about me than you know about Hell when someone tells you it is hot and dreadful? For that reason alone we human beings ought to stand before one another as reverently, as reflectively, as lovingly, as we would before the entrance to Hell

We come to mistake the crumbs of mercy for the feast of love

A loyal and loving son, Gregor feels obligated to pay off his parents' debt. Simply quitting would betray that loyalty.

it's only love which can't be helped

You are the knife I turn inside myself; that is love

I belong to you; there is really no other way of expressing it, and that is not strong enough.

Alles, was du liebst, geht sehr wahrscheinlich verloren, aber am Ende wird die Liebe auf andere Weise zurückkehren.

You belong to the people I have to combat, and you’re very comfortable among them, you’re even in love with the student, or if you don’t love him you do at least prefer him to your husband.

Milena birisi yüzünüzü iki elinin arasına sıkıştırıp , doğruca gözlerinizin içine bakmalı ki bu kişinin gözlerinde kendinizi gördükten sonra bir daha yazdığınız şeyleri aklınızadan bile geçiremeyeceksiniz.

But I must remind you, it was before you that I lost my self-respect, and gained a boundless sense of guilt. (Recollecting this boundlessness I once wrote of someone, ‘He feared the shame that would outlive him.’)  I couldn’t suddenly change when I was with other people; indeed with other people I felt even more guilty because of your attitude towards them – I felt implicated in this and I had to atone for your words.  And you always spoke badly of people that I had dealings with – sometimes openly, sometimes secretly – and I had to atone for that as well.  In business and in the family you tried to instil a mistrust of people in my mind (when I admired someone, you buried him with criticism).  And you could do this without it weighing you down (you were strong enough for that) though your attitude might just have been a lordly affectation.  But your mistrust was misplaced, with my childish eyes I couldn’t see what you  saw: for everywhere there were extraordinary, unmatchable people – so instead I gained a mistrust of myself, and an abiding fear of everyone.  So in this respect your influence on me was absolute.  And you didn’t see that; possibly because you had not experienced my sort of dealings with people, and so you were doubtful and jealous (but do I deny that you loved me?) and you thought that I had found some sort of compensation elsewhere, for you couldn’t imagine that I lived in the outside world as I did in your presence. Yet as child I found some comfort in my mistrust of my judgement: I doubted my insight, I said to myself, ‘Like all children you exaggerate, you feel little things too much and believe they have great weight.’  But this comfort dwindled as I grew up and has almost vanished. Equally

It may be possible, I would not know, for a man who has conquered chaos to begin to write; those will be holy books. Or begin to love; that will be love, not fear of chaos...Not until the world has been ordered does the writer begin.

Should I be grateful or should I curse the fact that despite all misfortune I can still feel love, an unearthly love but still for earthly objects. ― Franz Kafka, Diaries of Franz Kafka 1910-1923. (Schocken October 30, 1988) Originally published 1949.

Then, at the last moment, I am forced to admit to myself that I was right after all, and that it was really impossible to go down into the burrow without exposing the thing I love best, for a little while at least, to all my enemies, on the ground, in the trees, in the air.

In our folk nobody has any experience of youth, there’s barely even any time for being a toddler. The children simply don’t have any time in which they might be children........Indeed... there’s simply no way that we would be able to provide our children with a viable childhood, one that is real. Naturally, there are consequences. There’s a certain ever present, not to be liquidated childishness that permeates our folk; We often act in ways that are totally and utterly ridiculous and, indeed, precisely like children we do things that are crazy, letting loose with our assets in a manner that is bereft of all rationality, prodigious in our celebrations, partaking in a light-headed frivolousness that is divorced from all sensibility, and often enough all simply for the sake of some small token of fun, so much do we love having our small amusements. But our folk isn’t only childish, to a certain extent we also age prematurely, childhood and old age mix themselves differently with us than by others. We don’t have any youth, we jump right away into maturity and, then, we remain grown-ups for too long and as a consequence to this there’s a broad shadow of a certain tiredness and a sort of hopelessness that colours our essential nature, a nature that as a whole is otherwise so tenacious and permeated by hope, strong hope. This, no doubt, this is related to why we’re so disinclined toward music—we’re too old for music, so much excitement, so much passion doesn’t sit well with our heaviness;

I've read the Sunday letter once again, it's even more terrible than I thought after the first reading. One ought, Milena, to take your face between both hands and look steadily into your eyes so that you would recognize yourself in the eyes of the other and from then on be incapable even of thinking the kind of things you wrote in this letter.

The golem is for Franz Kafka big headache.." The ache, he confided, grew in Kafka's head, spreading throughout his bones, his joints swelling until there was no longer room in the writer's skin for both himself and the golem; then his skin split at the seams, and the creature burst forth like the Incredible Hulk, thereby expelling Kafka from his own body. What do you have in common with Jews?" Svatopluk was whispering in my ear. "This, Kafka us asked at a crucial point in his life, and replies, 'I have nothing in common with myself, and should sit quietly in corner content that I can breathe.'" Highly suggestible, I saw the monster born from Kafka's brain not as a magical or supernatural creation but a behaimeh member of the community that trafficked in the impossible. I saw the creature lumbering gumby-like behind his plodding master just as I had followed Svat, or poor dead Billy or Aunt Keni Shendeldecker, the only woman I'd ever loved; I saw the citizens of the rabbi's courtyard gossiping, making lame jokes about the golem's marriageability and his alleged prowess in bed.

If I closely examine what is my ultimate aim, it turns out that I am not really striving to be good and to fulfil the demands of a Supreme Judgement, but rather very much the contrary: I strive to know the whole human and animal community, to recognize their basic predilections, desires, moral ideals, to reduce these to simple rules and as quickly as possible trim my behaviour to these rules in order that I may find favour in the whole world’s eyes; and, indeed (this is the inconsistency), so much favour that in the end I could openly perpetrate the iniquities within me without alienating the universal love in which I am held –the only sinner who won’t be roasted. To sum up, then, my sole concern is the human tribunal, which I wish to deceive, moreover, though without practising any actual deception.

We are like abandoned children lost in the woods. When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours. And if I were to cast myself down before you and weep and tell you, what more would you know about me than you know about Hell when someone tells you it is hot and dreadful? For that reason alone we human beings ought to stand before one another as reverently, as reflectively, as lovingly, as we would before the Gate of Hell.

All knowledge, the totality of all questions and all answers, is contained in the dog. —Franz Kafka We are alone, absolutely alone on this chance planet; and amid all the forms of life that surround us, not one, excepting the dog, has made an alliance with us. —Maurice Maeterlinck If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man. —Mark Twain A dog is the only thing on earth that loves you more than he loves himself. —Josh Billings

Şimdi ise , yüreğine ve aklına aynı şekilde etki eden bir sesle Milena seni çağırıyor. Tabii ki Milena seni tanımıyor, duyduğu bir kaç hikaye ve yazılan bazı mektuplar gözünü kör etmiş. Milena bir deniz gibi, içinde çok fazla su barındıran bir deniz kadar güçlü, tüm gücüyle patlayan fakat bazen yanlış yola girip ölümü ya da uzaktaki ayı takip eden. O seni tanımıyor, gelmeni istemesi gerçeği anlamak istemesinden başka bir şey değil. Senin mevcut halini gördükten sonra gözlerinin açılacağından emin olabilirsin. Bundan çekindiğin için mi gitmek istemiyorsun hassas ruh, korktuğun tam olarak bu değil mi?

If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skulls, then why do we read it? Good Lord, we also would be happy if we had no books and such books that make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. What we must have are those books that come on us like ill fortune, like the death of one we love better than ourselves, like suicide. A book must be an ice axe to break the sea frozen inside us. 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 ax for the frozen sea within us.

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.

The unhappiness of the bachelor, whether seeming or actual, is so easily guessed at by the world around him that he will curse his decision, at least if he has remained a bachelor because of the delight he takes in secrecy. He walks around with his coat buttoned, his hands in the upper pockets of his jacket, his arms akimbo, his hat pulled down over his eyes, a false smile that has become natural to him is supposed to shield his mouth as his glasses do his eyes, his trousers are tighter than seem proper for his thin legs. But everyone knows his condition, can detail his sufferings. A cold breeze breathes upon him from within and he gazes inward with the even sadder half of his double face. He moves incessantly, but with predictable regularity, from one apartment to another. The farther he moves away from the living, for whom he must still – and this is the worst mockery – work like a conscious slave who dare not express his consciousness, so much the smaller a space is considered sufficient for him. While it is death that must still strike down the others, though they may have spent all their lives in a sickbed – for even though they would have gone down by themselves long ago from their own weakness, they nevertheless hold fast to their loving, very healthy relatives by blood and marriage – he, this bachelor, still in the midst of life, apparently of his own free will resigns himself to an ever smaller space, and when he dies the coffin is exactly right for him.

I looked at her much less often than I wanted to.

We are not in general a music-loving race. Tranquil peace is the music we love best; our life is hard, we are no longer able, even on occasions when we have tried to shake off the cares of daily life, to rise to anything so high and remote from our usual routine as music.

because she loved comfort and therefore solitude above all else and was probably happiest when she could stretch out on the couch at home in complete freedom with the cat beside her

I’m unpunctual, because I don’t feel the pains of waiting. I wait like a cow. For when I feel a purpose, even if a very uncertain one, of my momentary existence, I’m so vain in my weakness that, once this purpose has been set before me, I will gladly tolerate anything for its sake. If I were in love, what I could do then. How long I waited years ago under the arcades on the Ring until M.[380] came by and even if she only passed by with her lover.

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.

Despite all this, writing really is a good thing; I am now calmer than I was 2 hours ago outside on the balcony with your letter. While I was lying there a beetle had fallen on its back one step away and was desperately trying to right itself; I would have gladly helped—it was so easy, so obvious, all that was required was a step and a small shove—but I forgot about it because of your letter; I was just as incapable of getting up. Only a lizard again made me aware of the life around me, its path led over the beetle, which was already so completely still that I said to myself, this was not an accident but death throes, the rarely witnessed drama of an animal’s natural death; but when the lizard slid off the beetle, the beetle was righted although it did lie there a little longer as if dead, but then ran up the wall of the house as if nothing had happened. Somehow this probably gave me, too, a little courage; I got up, drank some milk and wrote to you.

In my novel The Kingdom of Love, in the figure of Richard Garta I have set down very much of what remains of Kafka in my heart and memory. Write an objective biography of Kafka! - that I felt I could not do at that time, four years after his death. It is only now, after nine more years have passed, thirteen years, that is, after the catastrophe, that I can bring myself to do it. At that time, however, I lived still with my unforgettable friend, he was present with me in the truest sense of the word, always by my side, I knew exactly what he would have said in this or that situation, exactly how he would have thought about things that went on round about me. I asked him questions, and could answer myself in his name. That is how I came to feel the necessity of bringing my incomparable friend to life in the form of a living work of art, not in a historical study collecting dates and carefully piecing facts together, but as an epic figure. Above all, I wanted to bring him to life for myself in this new way. So long as I lived in this book, in working at it, he was not dead, he still lived with me and still exerted his influence on my life.