Franz Kafka Quotes

She could not trust herself to hope—but without hope, she realized, she had no reason to go on.

Desire, despair, desire. So many monsters.

I lived like a man who wanted to die but who had no courage to do it himself.

For always in her there was a dark place full of despair and a great dividing force to make meaning because there was none.

I could not bear the deep freeze settling around my bones at the thought that yet another attempt to get out of my life alive would end in disappointment. Time became palpable and viscous. Every minute, every second, every nanosecond, wrapped around my spine so that my nerves tightened and ached. I faded into abstraction. A self-generated narcosis created a painful blank where my mind used to be.

Profound, bottomless self-doubt - it has no value - what's the point? In a way, it takes up as much time as anything else.

I live in my deepest hell and from there I cannot fall any further.

For a long time now, every meeting with another human being has been the reverberations after even the simplest conversation. But the deep collision is and has been with my unregenerate, tormenting and tormented self...I am unable to become what I see. I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful halt, "won't go".

How hard could it be? Is it really going to hurt? You get into that deep well of emotion if you are by yourself. Why am I here? What's the point of going on? If I can't do what I want to do, then what's the point?

Melancholy and sadness are the start of doubt... doubt is the beginning of despair; despair is the cruel beginning of the differing degrees of wickedness.

Sometimes my heart hurts so much, I beat it with my fists. I try to run. But you cannot run from this. It waits for you. Even when you think you have escaped it, it is there.

I'm half alive but I feel mostly dead.

It's curious how we act in moments of personal despair.

The darkest moments for me weren't necessarily winding up in the hospital or anything like that. It was those quiet moments alone when I just hated the person I had become.

…I hate myself for not being able to go downstairs naturally and seek comfort in numbers. I hate myself for having to sit here and be torn between I know not what within me.

Even now, as I write this, I can still feel that tightness. And I want you to feel it--the wind coming off the river, the waves, the silence, the wooded frontier. You're at the bow of a boat on the Rainy River. You're twenty-one years old, you're scared, and there's a hard squeezing pressure in your chest. What would you do? Would you jump? Would you feel pity for yourself? Would you think about your family and your childhood and your dreams and all you're leaving behind? Would it hurt? Would it feel like dying? Would you cry, as I did?

I am ignorant and impotent and yet, somehow or other, here I am, unhappy, no doubt, profoundly dissatisfied ... In spite of everything I survive.

Doubt, not self-reflection, comes from a destructive energy, and when it rears its head, I talk to it like a lunatic.

He wished he could relieve himself of his doubts and guilts half as easily.

The cloud of caring for nothing, which overshadowed him with such a fatal darkness, was very rarely pierced by the light within him.

Sometimes I worry that I've lost the plot My twitching muscles tease my flippant thoughts I never really dreamed of heaven much Until we put him in the ground. There is nothing as lucky, as easy, or free

Worry, fear, self-distrust bows the heart and turns the spirit back to dust.

Everything mattered and nothing did, and I was tired of trying to find out how both of those things were true. I was an itch that I'd scratched so hard I was bleeding. I had set out to do the impossible, whatever the impossible might be, only to find out that it was living with myself. Suicide became an expiration date, the day after which I no longer had to try.

Having got into bed and turned out the light, I quietly burst into tears because I am not a good person. As they came and went for some minutes, I was concerned with the words following 'because' in the previous sentence, rewriting them over and over in my head until they seemed to be as close to the truth as it was possible for me to make them.