#kafka

And when the storm is over, you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of a storm, you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what the storm is about ↗

— Haruki Murakami

#inspirational #kafka-on-the-shore #inspirational

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. ~quoting Franz Kafka ↗

— Alberto Manguel

#death

Nothing expresses Kafka’s innermost sense of self more profoundly than his lapidary definition of “writing as a form of prayer”: he was a writer. Not a man who wrote, but one to whom writing was the only form of being, the only means of defying death in life. ↗

— Ernst Pawel

#kafka #life #writers #writing #death

This brings me back to the image of Kafka standing before a fish in the Berlin aquarium, a fish on which his gaze fell in a newly found peace after he decided not to eat animals. Kafka recognized that fish as a member of his invisible family- not as his equal, of course, but as another being that was his concern. ↗

— Jonathan Safran Foer

#kafka #veganism #vegetarianism #equality

Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it at every moment. ↗

— Franz Kafka

#franz-kafka #heaven #kafka #life #moment

If, in the Judaic perception, the language of the Adamic was that of love, the grammars of fallen man are those of the legal code. ↗

— George Steiner

#kafka #laws #love #love

Every single day, each time I see her face, see her, it's utterly precious. ↗

— Haruki Murakami

#kafka-on-the-shore #love #miss-saeki #murakami #love

Fat Charlie had had no real liking for the police, but until now, he had still managed to cling to a fundamental trust in the natural order of things, a conviction that there was some kind of power--a Victorian might have thought of it as Providence--that ensured that the guilty would be punished while the innocent would be set free. This faith had collapsed in the face of recent events and had been replaced by the suspicion that he would spend the rest of his life pleading his innocence to a variety of implacable judges and tormenters, many of whom would look like Daisy, and that he would in all probability wake up in cell six the next morning to find that he had been transformed into an enormous cockroach. He had definitely been transported to the kind of maleficent universe that transformed people into cockroaches. ↗

— Neil Gaiman

#justice #wrongfully-accused #faith

I am a cage, in search of a bird. ↗

— Franz Kafka

#birds

In the critic's vocabulary, the word "precursor" is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotations of polemic or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future." -- Essay: "Kafka and his Precursors ↗

— Jorge Luis Borges

#writers-quotes