Herr Kafka, Essen She Kane Year." (As one and only piece of dialog K recalls from his meeting with Rudolf Steiner - "Mr. Kafka don't eat eggs.

— Franz Kafka

[He] used to be so insignificant that one literally felt alone in his presence.

— Franz Kafka

However, Gregor had become much calmer. All right, people did not understand his words anymore, although they seemed clear enough to him, clearer than previously, perhaps because had gotten used to them

— Franz Kafka

How pathetically scanty my self-knowledge is compared with, say, my knowledge of my room. There is no such thing as observation of the inner world, as there is of the outer world.

— Franz Kafka

Human nature, essentially changeable, unstable as the dust, can endure no restraint; if it binds itself it soon begins to tear madly at its bonds, until it renders everything asunder, the wall, and the bonds and it's very self.

— Franz Kafka

I am as I am, and that's all there is to it, I can hardly take a pair of scissors to myself, and cut out a different person...

— Franz Kafka

I am a typical example of Western Jew. This means I don't have a moment of peace, that nothing has come easily to me, not just the present and the future, but even the past, that thing that each man receives as his birth-right: even that I have to conquer, and perhaps that is the hardest task.

— Franz Kafka

I am a very unhappy human being and you, dearest, simply had to be summoned to create an equilibrium for all this misery.

— Franz Kafka

I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones. Basically it is nothing other than this fear we have so often talked about, but fear spread to everything, fear of the greatest as of the smallest, fear, paralyzing fear of pronouncing a word, although this fear may not only be fear but also a longing for something greater than all that is fearful.

— Franz Kafka

I am so miserable, there are so many questions, I can see no way out and am so wretched and feeble that I could lie forever on the sofa and keep opening and closing my eyes without knowing the difference.

— Franz Kafka