Most men are not wicked... They are sleep-walkers, not evil evildoers.
I write to close my eyes.
But then - I was just following him in reverie over mountain and valley - he jumped with both feet onto the middle of my body. I shuddered with wild pain, utterly uncomprehending. Who was it? A child? A gymnast? A daredevil? A suicide? A tempter? An annihilator?
Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one's own self.
We are sinful not only because we have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, but also because we have not yet eaten of the Tree of Life. The state in which we are is sinful, irrespective of guilt.
First impressions are always unreliable.
Illusions are more common than changes in fortune.
The messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after his arrival; he will come, not on the last day, but on the very last.
Scratch your flesh raw between your toes, but you won't find the answer.
Association with human beings lures one into self-observation.
Those who choose to despise us find themselves in the best company.
All I did there, after all, was to bemoan what I could not bemoan upon your breast.
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.
However, Gregor had become much calmer. All right, people did not understand his words any more, although they seemed clear enough to him, clearer than previously, perhaps because had gotten used to them.
Writing is a sweet, wonderful reward...
Shoulder to shoulder, a coordinated movement of the people, their blood no longer confined in the limited circulation of the body but rolling sweetly and yet still returning through the infinite extent of China.
Asking questions were the most important thing.
It is as if a person were a prisoner, and he had not only the intention to escape, which would perhaps be attainable, but also, and indeed simultaneously, the intention to rebuild the prison as a pleasure dome for himself. But if he escapes, he cannot rebuild, and if he rebuilds, he cannot escape.
Writing is prayer.
So long as you have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being.
And thus it happens that the reader, the closer he comes to the novel's end, the more he wishes he were back in the summer with which it begins, and finally, instead of following the hero onto the cliffs of suicide, joyfully turns back to that summer, content to stay there forever.
And for a little while he lay still, breathing lightly as if he expected total repose would restore everything to its normal and unquestionable state.
Sensual love deceives one as to the nature of heavenly love; it could not do so alone, but since it unconsciously has the element of heavenly love within it, it can do so.
Other opportunities arise from time to time that almost don't accord with the overall situation, opportunities whereby a word, a glance, a sigh of trust may achieve more than a lifetime of exhausting endeavour.
Fear of night. Fear of not night.
One advantage in keeping a diary is that you become aware with reassuring clarity of the changes which you constantly suffer.
The longer one hesitates before the door, the more estranged one becomes.
I am dirty, Milena, endlessly dirty, that is why I make such a fuss about cleanliness. None sing as purely as those in deepest hell; it is their singing we take for the singing of angels.
There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe ... but not for us.
Last night I dreamed about you. What happened in detail I can hardly remember, all I know is that we kept merging into one another. I was you, you were me. Finally you somehow caught fire.
These are the seductive voices of the night; the Sirens, too, sang that way. It would be doing them an injustice to think that they wanted to seduce; they knew they had claws and sterile wombs, and they lamented this aloud. They could not help it if their laments sounded so beautiful.
In a way, you are poetry material; You are full of cloudy subtleties I am willing to spend a lifetime figuring out. Words burst in your essence and you carry their dust in the pores of your ethereal individuality.
You have given me a gift such as I never even dreamt of finding in this life.
The person I am in the company of my sisters has been entirely different from the person I am in the company of other people. Fearless, powerful, surprising, moved as I otherwise am only when I write.
The onlookers go rigid when the train goes past.
Torment yourself as little as possible, then you'll torment me less.
Sometimes I'm overcome with such an aversion to human beings that I can barely refrain from retching.
My job is unbearable to me because it conflicts with my only desire and my only calling, which is literature. Since I am nothing but literature and can and want to be nothing else, my job will never take possession of me, it may, however, shatter me completely, and this is by no means a remote possibility.
Gregor converted his success at work straight into cash that he could lay on the table at home for the benefit of his astonished and delighted family.
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?
And i would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more.
What am I doing in this eternal winter?
The crows assert that a single crow could destroy the heavens.This is certainly true,but it proves nothing against the heavens,because heaven means precisely:the impossibility of crows.
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.
The indestructible is one: it is each individual human being and, at the same time, it is common to all, hence the incomparably indivisible union that exists between human beings.
The history of mankind is the instant between two strides taken by a traveler.
His growing lack of concern for the others hardly surprised him, whereas previously he had prided himself on being considerate.
Tyranny or slavery, born of selfishness, are the two educational methods of parents; all gradations of tyranny or slavery.
It's only because of their stupidity that they're able to be so sure of themselves.
