In true For Reading Addicts style we have here for you 8 Kafkaesque Quotes from Franz Kafka to celebrate the writings of an author who is probably just as famous for the eponymous kafkaesque entry into dictionaries as he is for his actual novels.
His best known works include “Die Verwandlung” (“The Metamorphosis”), Der Process (The Trial), and Das Schloss (The Castle) and they are known for the often bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible social-bureaucratic powers which his inevitably isolated protagonists are forced to face.
Born on July the 3rd 1883 into a Jewish family in Prague Germany very few of Kafka’s works were ever published during his lifetime and many of his writings including including his novels Der Process, Das Schloss and Amerika (also known as Der Verschollene,The Man Who Disappeared), were meant to have been destroyed upon his death. However his friend Max Brod, who he had entrusted these to, decided against the destruction of the novels and were subsequently published.
“Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.”
“Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.”
“Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”
“All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else.”
“I am a cage, in search of a bird.”
“The meaning of life is that it stops.”
“Books are a narcotic.”
“By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.”
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Nice article – but, to the best of my knowledge, Prague was in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, not Germany, in 1883.