Kafkaesque Quotes

the blend of absurd, surreal and mundane which gave rise to the adjective "kafkaesque

She smiled darkly and shook her head. 'I'm not crazy. I'm not. Of course what else would a crazy person claim? That's the Kafkaesque genius of it all. If you're not crazy but people have told the world you are, then all your protests to the contrary just underscore their point. Do you see what I'm saying?

Everything creepy and Southern isn't Faulknerian, just like everything annoying isn't Kafkaesque.

Gregor’s serious wound, from which he suffered for over a month - the apple remained imbedded in his flesh as a visible souvenir since no one dared to remove it - seemed to have reminded even his father that Gregor was a member of the family, in spite of his present pathetic and repulsive shape, who could not be treated as an enemy; that, on the contrary, it was the commandment of the family duty to swallow their disgust and endure him, endure him and nothing more.

It's no accident that in a bureaucracy getting fired is called 'termination,' as in ontological erasure.

Love inscribes the body-- and this is a process as excruciating as it sounds. For some of us it is literal, Kafkaesque. A selbst-verlusting that is both terrifying and pleasurable. The body does not pre-exist love, but is cast in its fires.

It was a Kafkaesque circle of reasoning. Keys’s hypothesis had evidently managed to sail over the normal hurdles of scientific proof such that the mere act of testing the diet was now considered unethical.

It is possible that some people are sorry for me, but I am not aware of it.

The closest that most of us come to a direct experience of the centerlessness of capitalism is an encounter with the call center. As a consumer in late capitalism, you increasingly exist in two, distinct realities: the one in which the services are provided without hitch, and another reality entirely, the crazed Kafkaesque labyrinth of call centers, a world without memory, where cause and effect connect together in mysterious, unfathomable ways, where it is a miracle that anything ever happens, and you lose hope of ever passing back over to the other side, where things seem to function smoothly. What exemplifies the failure of the neoliberal world to live up to its own PR better than the call center? Even so, the universality of bad experiences with call centers does nothing to unsettle the operating assumption that capitalism is inherently efficient, as if the problems with call centers weren’t the systemic consequences of a logic of Capital which means organizations are so fixated on making profits that they can’t actually sell you anything. The call center experience distils the political phenomenology of late capitalism: the boredom and frustration punctuated by cheerily piped PR, the repeating of the same dreary details many times to different poorly trained and badly informed operatives, the building rage that must remain impotent because it can have no legitimate object, since – as is very quickly clear to the caller –there is no-one who knows, and no-one who could do anything even if they could. Anger can only be a matter of venting; it is aggression in a vacuum, directed at someone who is a fellow victim of the system but with whom there is no possibility of communality. Just as the anger has no proper object, it will have no effect. In this experience of a system that is unresponsive, impersonal, centerless, abstract and fragmentary, you are as close as you can be to confronting the artificial stupidity of Capital in itself. Call center angst is one more illustration of the way that Kafka is poorly understood as exclusively a writer on totalitarianism; a decentralized, market Stalinist bureaucracy is far more Kafkaesque than one in which there is a central authority. Read, for instance, the bleak farce of K’s encounter with the telephone system in the Castle, and it is hard not to see it as uncannily prophetic of the call center experience.

I stand on the end platform of the tram and am completely unsure of my footing in this world, in this town, in my family.

Kafkaesque The term's meaning has transcended the literary realm to apply to real-life occurrences and situations that are incomprehensibly complex, bizarre, or illogical.

Rather like "Orwellian", the term "Kafkaesque" has come to be used, often enough by those who have not read a word of Kafka, to describe what are perceived as typically or even uniquely modern traumas: existential alienation, isolation and insecurity, the labyrinth of state bureaucracy, the corrupt or whimsical abuse of totalitarian power, the impenetrable tangle of legal systems, the knock on the door in the middle of the night….

Does the first slanting ray of light; not lie? Catapulted from the arching mountains, into a small stinking dungeon, peeking through the curtains; humming lies. Lies land on the ears like an autumn leaf- falling every so gently to no breeze of the dawn.

From the Memoirs of a Non-enemy Combatant is sharply written and wryly witty, touching on the sensitivities and paranoia of post-9/11 America... Combining a Kafkaesque hero with a captivating “coming to New York” story, Gilvarry’s debut is a timely and touching triumph.

Indeed, there is something about reading in a restaurant that is borderline romantic. Leaning back in that corner booth, an evocative title in our hands, a stale cup of java in front of us, every so often bolting forward to jot a phrase onto the napkin, we look like, well, poets-unknown belletrists scraping through the hardscrabble years and awaiting the distinction that is imminent. the waiter of waitress refills our cup, we drop a memorable apothegm or two, share a laugh fraught with meaning, scope out the joint, and return to our tome. Nonbiblioholics strain to espy our title; conversation is struck up on things Kafkaesque and Kierkegaardian; and we forge a genuine biblioholic simpatico with all around.

As I lie in bed I assume the shape of a big beetle, a stag beetle or a cockchafer, I think.

My money is in the hands of strangers.

Now, when I can bring myself to think of that time at all—another blackout, by beauty, of the cities of memory—my sadness can’t shake off the rage that follows it close behind. To whom do I petition for that lost year? How many inches in height did I lose from having calcium withheld from my bones, their osteoblasts struggling without nourishment to multiply? How many years sooner will a brittle spine bend my neck down? In the Kafkaesque departments of this bureau of hunger, which charged me guilty for a crime no more specific than inhabiting a female body, what door do I knock upon? Who is obliged to make reparations to me for the thought abandoned, the energy never found, the explorations never considered? Who owes me for the yearlong occupation of a mind at the time of its most urgent growth?

The fortress was fashioned by my hard work and I paid dearly in constructing it. It had to be hammered into a firm state and I was glad when the blood came. It was proof the walls were hardening. - The Burrow

She’ll deny all of it, and she’ll believe herself. In part of her mind, what’s about to happen to her will be some Kafkaesque inexplicable injustice. But there’s also a part that knows the truth, and that’s the part that murders lawyers and pushes people over cliffs. It’s called narcissistic rage. It’s what happens when something threatens to shatter the grandiose illusion a narcissist has of being perfect, always in the right, always in control.

İdareci sınıfın ne düşündüğüne hakkında hiçbir fikrim yoktu. Bir çukuru kazınca, haydi bakalım doldur orayı derler; doldurursunuz, bu kez de aynı yeri kaz bakalım, derler. Sıkıntıya katlananlar hep benim gibi, görev yerinde çalışanlar olur.

He rolled and thrashed in his bed, waiting for the dancing blue shadows to come in his window, waiting for the heavy knock on his door, waiting for some bodiless, Kafkaesque voice to call: Okay, open up in there! And when he finally fell asleep he did it without knowing it, because thought continued without a break, shifting from conscious rumination to the skewed world of dreams with hardly a break, like a car going from drive to low. Even in his dreams he thought he was awake, and in his dreams he committed suicide over and over: burned himself; bludgeoned himself by standing under an anvil and pulling a rope; hanged himself; blew out the stove’s pilot lights and then turned on the oven and all four burners; shot himself; defenestrated himself; stepped in front of a moving Greyhound bus; swallowed pills; swallowed Vanish toilet bowl disinfectant; stuck a can of Glade Pine Fresh aerosol in his mouth, pushed the button, and inhaled until his head floated off into the sky like a child’s balloon; committed hara-kiri while kneeling in a confessional at St. Dom’s, confessing his self-murder to a dumbfounded young priest even as his guts accordioned out onto the bench like beef stew, performing an act of contrition in a fading, bemused voice as he lay in his blood and the steaming sausages of his intestines. But most vividly, over and over, he saw himself behind the wheel of the LTD, racing the engine a little in the closed garage, taking deep breaths and leafing through a copy of National Geographic, examining pictures of life in Tahiti and Aukland and the Mardi Gras in New Orleans, turning the pages ever more slowly, until the sound of the engine faded to a faraway sweet hum and the green waters of the South Pacific inundated him in rocking warmth and took him down to a silver fathom.

The administration’s denial was also egregiously manifest in its response to the massacre of 13 unarmed soldiers at Fort Hood by an Islamic fanatic, who three and a half years later still has not been brought to trial. The Fort Hood terrorist successfully infiltrated the American military and despite open expressions of hatred against the West was promoted to U.S. Army Major. The Obama administration’s Kafkaesque response to an obvious case of Islamist violence against the U.S. was to classify the terrorist attack as an incident of “workplace violence,” and thus to hide the fact that Hasan was a Muslim soldier in a war against the infidels of the West.

When I was an undergraduate, the censors attacked the university from without. Now, they are entrenched in the faculties and administrations themselves. Then, the university defined itself as an institution "dedicated to the disinterested pursuit of knowledge." Now, every term of that definition is under siege by postmodernists and deconstructionists who have become the new academic establishment and have redefined the university as "an institution dedicated to social change." That is one reason why the academy, once perceived as a redoubt of intellectual freedom and cutting-edge discourse, has become the butt of snickering jokes about political correctness and the font of Kafkaesque tales about bureaucratic censorship and administrative obtuseness.

The Routine… ...is not a scene from Alfonso Cuarón’s movie nor a part in Roger Waters “The Wall” Orson Welles might have come close with Kafkaesque nightmares But I beg to differ Routine is ungraspable, unexplainable It is more than just a row of robotic, faceless humanoid figures and less Panem-like It is the tick of an imaginary clock the unprecedented passing time The lure behind the lore Gravitational, earthquake-ish and magnanimous I look at the world and there it is going around in constant rhythms But here I am trapped in the tiniest corner of the tightest corners working my brains out, my fingers, my nimble soul Each to his own Each to his back David and Goliath style How do you wait when the wait is the fate of the unsure? How do you pretend to dream? How do you live in the now when the NOW is all there is to live

I haven't re-read Kafka for forty years. I had a second read-through when first teaching English at the University of Warwick in the 1970s, but since then have not been tempted to return. The reason for this, I suspect, is that he is a young person's writer, not in the sense that only the young can appreciate him, but because on first exposure he is so comprehensively and unexpectedly formative that you may never feel the need to read him again. He becomes part of you, and your mind and spirit and view of the human condition are inhabited by his stories, his views, and especially his characters: by poor persecuted Josef K., by Gregor Samsa trapped in his rotting shell, by the hunger artist, yearning to find something, anything, that is actually good to eat, by poor K., who can't get into the castle to visit the Authorities. Kafkaesque: a world incomprehensible, alienating and threatening, absurd. We visit it with incomprehension and at our peril, lost at all points, disorientated, inoculated against faith, searchers for meaning in a book - and universe that either has none, or in which it lurks inaccessibly. Once you have read Kafka, you know this.

Later, on April 15, 1999, a crowd of protestors led by the Reverend Al Sharpton shut down half of the Brooklyn Bridge, capping ten weeks of demonstrations following the killing of a twenty-three-year-old West African immigrant, Amadou Diallo, by four white New York City police officers. The officers had sprayed forty-one bullets into Mr. Diallo's apartment building vestibule, striking him nineteen times. Mr. Diallo was unarmed and had no police record. New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, a Republican, declined to criticize the police department whose tactics he had historically endorsed. As the crowd, estimated from fifteen to twenty-five thousand, gathered at Brooklyn's Cadman Plaza, jury selection proceeded next door in the trial of four different white New York City police officers accused of torturing Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant, in a Brooklyn police station in 1997. The demonstrations, growing larger and more multiracial, had begun to spread around the country in response to the horrific acts of police brutality. The canvas, stood back from, had a chilling Kafkaesque quality about it. Instrumentalities of the state had been used to spectacularly kill one completely innocent and defenseless man and brutally maim another. Mayor Giuliani appeared to accept this as a reasonable price of effective law enforcement.

As I do my best to haggle down the prices further, Mr. Williams responds with a pained expression on his face, “Oh my, you can’t seriously believe that I could let you have that box set of The Big Bang Theory for anything less than $30. You must be dreaming… you must simply be dreaming. It’s all a big dream really, a nightmarish spectacle that feels completely at home in a society infatuated with the idea of attaining profit at all costs. I could never figure out to write in that unmistakable Kafkaesque style, and then I realized that narrating an average day in suburbia would suffice.

Ergo, the “Holocaust” has been declared a closed subject brooking no clarification, qualification, contradiction or revision if it happens to come into conflict with the officially accepted, legally mandated version. Restrained, intimidated and hamstrung by means of legal tyranny, highly qualified historians may soon find themselves arraigned before the courts like common criminals, facing terms in excess of five years’ imprisonment in some instances, and having no other option open to them than to ‘recant’ and “confess” in macabre Kafkaesque scenes reminiscent of Stalin’s infamous show trials. Such proceedings constitute a mockery of justice, since neither truth nor documentary evidence may be used as a means of vindication on behalf of the accused. Attorneys for the accused or judges renowned for their probity who hand down lenient sentences also run the risk of being charged, disbarred or censured. In fact, such instances are a rather common occurrence in those polities that have already criminalized “Holocaust denial.

The recent shift in the broader social understanding of sexual assault has been so dramatic and so overdue that it has obscured the fact that our systems still mostly fail on this particular topic—that, as demonstrated by the Kafkaesque Title IX bureaucracy, these systems are unequal to a crime that our culture actively manufactures. No crime is confounding and punitive the way rape is. No other violent offense comes with a built-in alibi that can instantly exonerate the criminal and place responsibility on the victim. There is no glorified interpersonal behavior that can be used to explain robbery or murder the way that sex can be used to explain rape. The best-case scenario for a rape victim in terms of adjudication is the worst-case scenario in terms of experience: for people to believe you deserve justice, you have to be destroyed. The fact that feminism is ascendant and accepted does not change this. The world that we believe in, that we’re attempting to make real and tangible, is still not the world that exists.

The recent shift in the broader social understanding of sexual assault has been so dramatic and so overdue that it has obscured the fact that our systems still mostly fail on this particular topic—that, as demonstrated by the Kafkaesque Title IX bureaucracy, these systems are unequal to a crime that our culture actively manufactures.

Take my warning to heart instead, and don't be so unyielding in future, you can't fight against this court, you must confess to guilt. Make your confession at the first chance you get. Until you do that, there is no possibility of getting out of their clutches, none at all.

He didn’t know what was happening here. Nothing about this interaction felt normal. A Kafkaesque situation. Although, having never read any Kafka, he wasn’t one hundred percent certain that was the correct use of the term.

For the first time Gersen saw indigenous fauna of Moudervelt: a band of lizard-foxes, with gray-green pangolin scales and a single optic orb. They reared high to watch Gersen pass by; when he slowed the car they advanced with dancing sidelong steps, for purposes Gersen could not guess. He drove on, leaving the troop staring after him.

We wanted to take the road to life, and we've come to a graveyard; we set out for a promised land, and all we see is a desert; we talked about justice, and all we know is terror and despair.

In Améry’s essays about his Holocaust experiences in the collection At the Mind’s Limits, the perspective of trauma has become inseparable from the image of stigmata inscribed onto his Jewish body, as a mark of physical disfiguration. Consequently the concept of trauma testimony has become inseparable from the disclosure of that stigmatization or disfiguration. This accounts for the idiosyncratic aesthetization of Améry’s writings, and places his philosophy of resentment within the Kafkaesque imaginary of a diseased, skeletal and feminized Jewish body (cf. Gilman 1997; Glowacka 2007).

One day, the ringmaster's eye fell upon the cage and he asked: "Why?" this perfectly good spot should be left standing there unused. Nobody knew, until one man remembered about the hunger artist. "Are you still fasting?" "Forgive me, everybody. "I've always wanted you to admire my fasting. "But you shouldn't admire it. Because I have to fast. I can't help it." "And why can't you help it?" "Because I couldn't find the food I liked. If I had, I should have stuffed myself life you or anyone else." Those were his last words, but in his dimming eyes remained the firm conviction that he was still continuing to fast. And they buried the hunger artist, straw and all. - A Hunger Artist

They put a young panther into the cage. The food he liked was brought to him without hesitation. He seemed not even to miss his freedom. The joy of life streamed from his throat with such ardent passion that for the onlookers it was not easy to stand the shock of it. But they braced themselves, crowded around the cage, and did not ever want to move away.

So, humans need to know about a book. Just as they need to know, when they apply for a job, if it will cause them to lose their mind at the age of fifty-nine and lead them to jump out of the office window. Or if, when they go on a first date, the person who is now making witticisms about his year in Cambodia will one day leave her for a younger woman called Francesca who runs her own public relations firm and says “Kafkaesque” without having ever read Kafka.

Dostoievsky says somewhere that if in the last moment before being executed, a man, however brave, were given the alternative of spending the rest of his days on the top of a bare rock with only enough space to sit on it, he would choose it with relief. There is indeed a Kafkaesque horror attached to an execution, which goes beyond the mere fear of death or pain or indignity. It is connected not with the brutality but with the macabre, cold-blooded politeness of the ceremony, in which the person whose neck is going to be broken is supposed to collaborate in a nice, sensible manner, as if it were a matter of a minor surgical operation. It is symbolized in the ceremonial handshake with the executioner; it is present in the delinquent’s knowledge that in the embarrassed stares of the officials he is already mirrored as a dead man with a blue face and ruptured vertebrae; and that what for him is the final, violent termination of life is for them merely an unpleasant duty, followed by a sigh of relief and a plate of bacon and eggs.

Many of my friends around the world express surprise at the Palestinian attachment to place of origin and concerns for family ties. Some even scoff at it and contrast it with their own open-armed acceptance of adventure, discovery, a nomadic lifestyle and residence in places that they choose and change according to their fancy, without the slightest regret at leaving family or even homeland behind. They remind me that the world is wider and more beautiful than 'our villages' and 'our families'. I understand this beautiful sense of the vastness of the world. Like them, I love movement, journeys, and living in new places. What these friends forget is that it is they who choose to distance themselves. They are the ones who take the decision and make the plans and then present their passports (recognized everywhere) and get on planes and trains and cars and motorcycles and go to places where three conditions that the Palestinian cannot meet are fulfilled: first, that it is their preference and choice to go to specifically these places; second, that these places always welcome them; and third and most important, that it is in their power to return to their home country whenever they desire and decide. The Palestinian forced to become a refugee, to migrate, and to go into exile from his homeland in the sixty years since the Nakba of 1948, or the forty since the June 1967 War, suffers miseries trying to obtain a document by which he will be recognized at borders. He suffers miseries trying to obtain a passport from another state because he is stateless and has to go through Kafkaesque interrogations before being granted entry visa to any place in the world, even the Arab states. The Palestinian is forbidden to enter his own country by land, sea, or air, even in a coffin. It is not a matter of romantic attachment to a place but of eternal exclusion from it. The Palestinian stripped of an original identity is a palm tree broken in the middle. My foreign friends have control over the details of their lives but a single Israeli solder can control the details of the life of any Palestinian. This is the difference. This is the story.

he had acted with no thought at all for what might follow and had been made to suffer for it.

he admits he doesn't know the law and at the same time insists he's innocent.

Kertész, thus, sketches Gyuri’s character as a subject who fails to make a successful passage into adult forms of identification (in accordance with the Kafkaesque understanding: “[T]o be patriot, husband, father. Ergo, the compulsory search for happiness” (Kertész 2006b: 171)), and who fails to dispense with the frailties of adolescence and senility.

Besides casual onlookers there were also permanent watchers. This was merely a formality: the artist would never swallow the smallest morsel of food. No one could possible watch the hunger artist continuously, therefore he was bound to be the sole spectator completely satisfied with his own fast. Such suspicions, anyhow, were a necessary accompaniment to the profession of fasting. Yet for other reasons he was never content. For he alone knew how easy it was to fast. Experience had proven that the interest of the public could be sustained for about forty days. But after that their enthusiasm began to wane. So on that day the cage was opened. Two doctors entered to measure the results of the fast, and two young ladies were selected for the honor of helping the hunger artist in a small table, on which was spread a carefully chosen meal. And at this moment the artist always turned stubborn. Why should he be cheated of the fame he would get for fasting longer, breaking his own record as the greatest hunger artist of all time? - A Hunger Artist

It's true that you're under arrest, but that shouldn't stop you from carrying out your job. And there shouldn't be anything to stop you carrying on with your usual life." "In that case it's not too bad, being under arrest," said K.

The disappearance of rugelach. Blintzes. Then Dmitri. Then his deli. It’s all a little Kafkaesque,’ says Abe Rosen gloomily.

Kafkaesque

The Hunter has been turned into a butterfly. Do not laugh.

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.

What’s Kafkaesque? Frederick R. Karl defined the term this way: "What’s Kafkaesque is when you enter a surreal world in which all your control patterns, all your plans, the whole way in which you have configured your own behavior, begins to fall to pieces, when you find yourself against a force that does not lend itself to the way you perceive the world. You don’t give up, you don’t lie down and die. What you do is struggle against this with all of your equipment, with whatever you have. But of course you don’t stand a chance. That’s Kafkaesque.

You're like a riddle wrapped in an enigma, but less Churchill and more Kafkaesque.