The meaning of life is that it stops. - 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."

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

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

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

"Kill me, or you are a murderer."