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"I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow on the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe."
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"Should it matter what genre it is if the book is good?"
"It's sarcasm, Josh.'Sarcasm?'It's from the Greek, sarkasmos. To bite the lips. It means that you aren't really saying what you mean, but people will get your point. I invented it, Bartholomew named it.'Well, if the village idiot named it, I'm sure it's a good thing.'There you go, you got it.'Got what?'Sarcasm.'No, I meant it.'Sure you did.'Is that sarcasm?'Irony, I think.'What's the difference?'I haven't the slightest idea.'So you're being ironic now, right?'No, I really don't know.'Maybe you should ask the idiot.'Now you've got it.'What?'Sarcasm."
"Is art really the priesthood that demands the pure in heart who belong to it wholly?"
"Guided only by their feeling for symmetry, simplicity, and generality, and an indefinable sense of the fitness of things, creative mathematicians now, as in the past, are inspired by the art of mathematics rather than by any prospect of ultimate usefulness."
"She was a poetry book with the wrong dust jacket, shelved in the Reference section."
"I like to cook, walk on the beach, go to concerts and look at fine art."
Explore more quotes by Franz Kafka
"Test yourself on mankind. It is something that makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe."
"One tells as few lies as possible only by telling as few lies as possible, and not by having the least possible opportunity to do so."
"It would have been so pointless to kill himself that, even if he had wanted to, the pointlessness would have made him unable."
"It is as if I were made of stone, as if I were my own tombstone, there is no loophole for doubt or for faith, for love or repugnance, for courage or anxiety, in particular or in general, only a vague hope lives on, but no better than the inscriptions on tombstones."
"But what if all the tranquility, all the comfort, all the contentment were now to come to a horrifying end?"
"Sensual love deceives one as to the nature of heavenly love; it could not do so alone, but since it unconsciously has the element of heavenly love within it, it can do so."
"One idiot is one idiot. Two idiots are two idiots. Ten thousand idiots are a political party."
"The existence of the writer is an argument against the existence of the soul, for the soul has obviously taken flight from the real ego, but not improved itself, only become a writer."
"In theory there is a possibility of perfect happiness: To believe in the indestructible element within one, and not to strive towards it."
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