Franz Kafka Quotes

There's no grand excellence to it. In my experience it was just almost the gulaggy boringness of it that'll kill you. You're just in this murk. And you're with other humans, but you lose all your human skills and it's just like you're in this plastic bag and you can't quite connect with people. You lose your ability to transmit electricity or something, and to receive it.

April 27. 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.

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. Not even casually could I indicate any claims that I might rightly advance in any direction. I have not even any defense to offer for standing on this platform, holding on to this strap, letting myself be carried along by this tram, nor for the people who give way to the tram or walk quietly along or stand gazing into shop windows. Nobody asks me to put up a defense, indeed, but that is irrelevant.

I still care about people but it would be so much easier not to care. I don't want to get too close; I don't like to touch things.

I am like the fish in the aquarium, thinking in a different language, adapting to a life that’s not my natural habitat. I am the people in the other cars, each with his or her own story, but passing too quickly to be noticed or understood.

I don't think words reach people. Maybe nothing does

I guess I always think of myself as more of the people. I always feel like a bit of an outsider.

I ought to warn you that my verse is of no interest to people who can think.

It's so strange how my life's changed; I know nothing about the people that I touch.

Because if I let myself feel the pain and the anger, I think it might kill me. Or I might kill someone else. I know it's wrong to feel that way about God and I know its's wrong to not feel anything. I hate it. I don't hate God. I hate not loving Him.

He walked on in silence, the solitary sound of his footsteps echoing in his head, as in a deserted street, at dawn. His solitude was so complete, beneath a lovely sky as mellow and serene as a good conscience, amid that busy throng, that he was amazed at his own existence; he must be somebody else's nightmare, and whoever it was would certainly awaken soon.

Boredom is a terrible affliction of the soulless.

I want to confess as best I can, but my heart is void. The void is a mirror. I see my face and feel loathing and horror. My indifference to men has shut me out. I live now in a world of ghosts, a prisoner in my dreams.

And yet I understood the alienation of being around others who couldn't really see you or chose not to. I'd felt the self-loathing that came with being a fraud, protraying an image of what you wished you could be but weren't. I'd lived with the fear that people you loved might turn away from you if they ever got to know the true person hidden inside.

My marriage didn't make me sad, but it didn't make me happy either. My husband and I hardly spoke to each other. This wasn't because we were angry. We had nothing to say. I was dying of boredom.

A book cannot apologize for what people may think it should be. It has to be authoritative.

I was sometimes embarrassed about making it - people look at you in a different way. You become this rich guy with the house. I wouldn't trade my life for anyone else's, but I've sometimes felt set apart from the people I work with. They think, "You're rich - you don't have problems."

I'm not the same as other people. I don't think the same. I don't do the same things. I just feel out of this world sometimes.

The thinking man always finds himself in a gigantic orphanage in which people are continually proving to him that he has no parents.

I have never really thought of him as a person, either.... A guy whose strings were broken, who didn’t feel the root of his leaves of grass connected to the field, a guy who was cracked. Like me.

I loved being in my own head so much, it was getting harder and harder being with other people.

I wish people were all trees and I think I could enjoy them then.

To be closed from everything, and yet to feel, to think...This is the truth of hell, stripped of its gaudy medievalisms. This loss of contact.

Things we think of as tremendous advantages can get in the way of being happy, and wealth is one of those things where people can become isolated within this luxury and not connect.