Franz Kafka

"The meaning of life is that it stops."

"Evil does not exist; once you have crossed the threshold, all is good. Once in another world, you must hold your tongue."

"Writing is prayer."

"From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back."

"He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived."

"A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us."

"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us."

"I need solitude for my writing; not 'like a hermit' - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man."

"Every word first looks around in every direction before letting itself be written down by me."

"Even the merest gesture is holy if it is filled with faith."

"Kill me, or you are a murderer."

"The Kafka paradox: art depends on truth, but truth, being indivisable, cannot know itself: to tell the truth is to lie. thus the writer is the truth, and yet when he speaks he lies."

"May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air."

"A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity."[Letter to Max Brod, July 5, 1922]"

"Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self."

"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."

"He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived."

"Books are a narcotic."

"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."

"Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old."