Catherine Wang > Catherine's Quotes

“And what is love, in the end?" Alabaster said. "Except the irrational desire to put evolutionary competitiveness aside in order to ease someone else's journey through life?”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

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

“Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.”
― Franz Kafka

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

“All language is but a poor translation.”
― 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, Letters to Milena

“By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.”
― Franz Kafka

“I never wish to be easily defined. I’d rather float over other people’s minds as something strictly fluid and non-perceivable; more like a transparent, paradoxically iridescent creature rather than an actual person.”
― Franz Kafka

“Now I can look at you in peace; I don't eat you any more.”
― Franz Kafka

“In man's struggle against the world, bet on the world.”
― Franz Kafka

“Most men are not wicked... They are sleep-walkers, not evil evildoers.”
― Franz Kafka

“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.”
― Franz Kafka

“And actually it is not you at all I love, but rather the existence you have bestowed on me”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

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

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

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

“In a way, you are poetry material; You are full of cloudy subtleties I am willing to spend a lifetime figuring out. Words burst in your essence and you carry their dust in the pores of your ethereal individuality.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

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

“You are at once both the quiet and the confusion of my heart.”
― Franz Kafka

“One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die. This life appears unbearable, another unattainable. One is no longer ashamed of wanting to die; one asks to be moved from the old cell, which one hates, to a new one, which one willl only in time come to hate. In this there is also a residue of belief that during the move the master will chance to come along the corridor, look at the prisoner and say: "This man is not to be locked up again, He is to come with me.”
― Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks

“sleep is the most innocent creature there is and a sleepless man
the most guilty.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“Logic may indeed be unshakeable, but it cannot withstand a man who is determined to live.”
― Franz Kafka, The Trial

“My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted.”
― Franz Kafka

“The limited circle is pure.”
― Franz Kafka

“I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.”
― Franz Kafka

“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

“Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.”
― Franz Kafka

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

“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

“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