QUOTES ⑅ FRANZ KAFKA

diaries, 1910-1923

• incapable of living with people, of speaking. complete immersion in myself, thinking of myself. apathetic, witless, fearful. i have nothing to say to anyone - never. ”
• people label themselves with all sorts of adjectives. i can only pronounce myself as 'nauseatingly miserable beyond repair'. ”
• being alone has a power over me that never fails. my interior dissolves (for the time being only superficially) and is ready to release what lies deeper. when i am willfully alone, a slight ordering of my interior begins to take place and i need nothing more. ”
• don't despair, not even over the fact that you don't despair. just when everything seems over with, new forces come marching up, and precisely that means that you are alive. and if they don't, then everything is over with here, once and for all. ”
• but I will write in spite of everything, absolutely; it is my struggle for self-preservation. ”
• 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. ”
• … my joints ache with fatigue, my dried up body trembles toward its own destruction in turmoils of which i dare not become fully conscious, in my head are astonishing convulsions. ”
• to die would mean nothing else than to surrender a nothing to the nothing, but that would be impossible to conceive, for how could a person, even only as a nothing, consciously surrender himself to the nothing, and not merely to an empty nothing but rather to a roaring nothing whose nothingness consists only in its incomprehensibility. ”

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letters to milena

• i am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something i only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones. basically it is nothing other than this fear we have so often talked about, but fear spread to everything, fear of the greatest as of the smallest, fear, paralyzing fear of pronouncing a word, although this fear may not only be fear but also a longing for something greater than all that is fearful. ”
• 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 through all eternity. ”

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i usually solve problems by letting them devour me. ” he is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived. ” i do not speak as i think, i do not think as i should, and so it all goes on in helpless darkness. ”