Franz Kafka Quotes

Lately, I'd been feeling like I was standing outside watching everything and everybody. Wishing I could take the part of me that was over there and the part of me that was over here and push them together—make myself into one whole person like everybody else.

I liked myself better when I wasn't me.

I've always felt like an alien trapped in a human form. We all do at some time or other; for me it's a permanent state, and I'm still unsure if Earth is a penance or a reward.

I'm a Jew. I'm fascinated by our culture and our history, by what made us the people we are. It influences every breath I take. It informs and guides me. Without it, I'd just be a vacuum.

I don't ever feel like anybody knows who I am.

I no longer feel the spirit of Europe.

Last night I walked clear down to Times Square & just as I arrived I suddenly realized I was a ghost - it was my ghost walking on the sidewalk.

I'm something that I used to be. I'm never where I feel I am, and if I seek myself, I don't know who's seeking me. My boredom with everything has numbed me. I feel banished from my soul.

I have never fit into this town, this marriage, this skin. I am the child who was picked last to play tag; I am the girl who laughed although she did not get the joke; I am the piecemeal part of you that you pretend doesn't exist, except it is all I am, all the time.

I think I may well be a Jew.

I’m living in separate universes, and I have no idea where I actually belong.

So, this is how it's become? This is how I've become? A walking contradiction? I'm surrounded by people and feel alone. I claim to crave a bit of normalcy but now that I have some, it's like I don't know what to do with it, I don't know how to be a normal person anymore.

The worst injury is feeling you don't belong so much / to you.

Most of the times that I think about my relationship to Judaism, I not only accuse myself of a shallowness, but I feel certain that there's a shallowness there. That's not a bad thing, really.

This mirror inside me shows. I can’t say what, but I can’t not know. I run from body. I run from spirit. I do not belong anywhere.

This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.

A Jew is anyone who says he is.

How puzzling all these changes are! I'm never sure what I'm going to be, from one minute to another.

I'm not really a practising Jew but I keep a kosher kitchen just to spite Hitler.

He had come so far from himself that I don't think he knew who he was anymore.

This uneasiness comes over me from time to time, and I feel as if I've somehow been pieced together from two different puzzles.

It’s just … everything. There are too many people. And I don’t fit in. I don’t know how to be. Nothing that I’m good at is the sort of thing that matters there. Being smart doesn’t matter—and being good with words. And when those things do matter, it’s only because people want something from me. Not because they want me.

There's this brutal imperial power, that my passport says I represent. But it will never represent where my heart lives, only vaguely where it went.

But it's no use now," thought poor Alice, "to pretend to be two people! Why, there's ahrdly enough of me left to make one respectable person!

I have no religion because I was born and raised Jewish. And on the first night of Hanukkah, my parents, when I was very young, gave me a top to play with. They called it a dreidel. I knew it was a top. And as I looked at that top, I said, 'You know. I don't think I'm gonna be Jewish for very long.