My talent for portraying my dreamlike inner life has thrust all other matters into the background; my life has dwindled dreadfully, nor will it cease to dwindle. Nothing else will ever satisfy me.
Catalog
Book
The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1910-1923
These diaries cover the years 1910 to 1923, the year before Kafka’s death at the age of forty. They provide a penetrating look into life in Prague and into Kafka’s accounts of his dreams, his feelings for the father he worshipped and the woman he could
Characters
My happiness, my abilities, and every possibility of being useful in any way have always been in the literary field.
When I arbitrarily write a single sentence, for instance, 'He looked out of the window,' it already has perfection.
How everything can be said, how far everything, for the strangest fancies, there waits a great fire in which they perish and rise up again. . . . Only in this way can writing be done, only with such coherence, with such a complete opening out of the body and the soul.
Always only the desire to die and the not-yet-yielding; this alone is love.
So much light and so empty.
Isolation is a way to know ourselves.
You’re really going, then? What shall I do? I cannot keep you. And If I could, I still wouldn’t want to.
This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me.
I never wish to be easily defined. I’d rather float over other people’s minds as something strictly fluid and non-perceivable; more like a transparent, paradoxically iridescent creature rather than an actual person.