We are sinful not only because we have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, but also because we have not yet eaten of the Tree of Life. The state in which we are is sinful, irrespective of guilt.

— Franz Kafka

We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

— Franz Kafka

We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.

— Franz Kafka

What is written is merely the dregs of experience.

— Franz Kafka

What I write is different from what I say, what I say is different from what I think, what I think is different from what I ought to think and so it goes further into the deepest darkness.

— Franz Kafka

What's happened to me,' he thought. It was no dream.

— Franz Kafka

When the little mouse, which was loved as none other was in the mouse-world, got into a trap one night and with a shrill scream forfeited its life for the sight of the bacon, all the mice in the district, in their holes were overcome by trembling and shaking; with eyes blinking uncontrollably they gazed at each other one by one, while their tails scraped the ground busily and senselessly. Then they came out, hesitantly, pushing one another, all drawn towards the scene of death. There it lay, the dear little mouse, its neck caught in the deadly iron, the little pink legs drawn up, and now stiff the feeble body that would so well have deserved a scrap of bacon. The parents stood beside it and eyed their child's remains.

— Franz Kafka

Woman, or more precisely put, perhaps, marriage, is the representative of life with which you are meant to come to terms.

— Franz Kafka

Writer speaks a stench.

— Franz Kafka

Writing is prayer.

— Franz Kafka