Cade Mez > Cade's Quotes

“I am free and that is why I am lost.”
― Franz Kafka

“All language is but a poor translation.”
― Franz Kafka

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need 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 within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka

“I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.”
― Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

“I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.”
― Franz Kafka

“A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity."

[Letter to Max Brod, July 5, 1922]”
― Franz Kafka

“I usually solve problems by letting them devour me.”
― Franz Kafka

“God, I ask you. Is trustfulness a sin?”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”
― Franz Kafka

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
― Franz Kafka

“I am a cage, in search of a bird.”
― Franz Kafka

“The meaning of life is that it stops.”
― Franz Kafka

“I have spent all my life resisting the desire to end it.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived.”
― Franz Kafka

“I am in chains. Don't touch my chains.”
― Kafka, Franz

“I do not speak as I think, I do not think as I should, and so it all goes on in helpless darkness.”
― Franz Kafka

“Better to have, and not need, than to need, and not have.”
― Franz Kafka

“They say ignorance is bliss.... they're wrong ”
― Franz Kafka

“Love is a drama of contradictions.”
― Franz Kafka

“First impressions are always unreliable.”
― Franz Kafka

“I’m doing badly, I’m doing well, whichever you prefer.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“You misinterpret everything, even the silence.”
― Franz Kafka, The Castle

“For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I'm not going to make it, but you laugh inside — remembering all the times you've felt that way.”
― Charles Bukowski

“what matters most is how well you walk through the fire”
― Charles Bukowski

“You have to die a few times before you can really
live.”
― Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

“My ambition is handicapped by laziness”
― Charles Bukowski, Factotum

“there is a loneliness in this world so great
that you can see it in the slow movement of
the hands of a clock.

people so tired
mutilated
either by love or no love.

people just are not good to each other
one on one.

the rich are not good to the rich
the poor are not good to the poor.

we are afraid.

our educational system tells us
that we can all be
big-ass winners.

it hasn't told us
about the gutters
or the suicides.

or the terror of one person
aching in one place
alone

untouched
unspoken to

watering a plant.”
― Charles Bukowski, Love Is a Dog from Hell

“I wanted the whole world or nothing.”
― Charles Bukowski, Post Office

“Find what you love and let it kill you.”
― Charles Bukowski