“This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me.”
― Kafka Franz, Diaries, 1910-1923
tags: artist-s-imagination, creative-imagination, creative-process, inner-world, world-building, writing
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“April 27. Incapable of living with people, of speaking. Complete immersion in myself, thinking of myself. Apathetic, witless, fearful. I have nothing to say to anyone - never.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923
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“People label themselves with all sorts of adjectives. I can only pronounce myself as 'nauseatingly miserable beyond repair'.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923
tags: misery
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“Forget everything. Open the windows. Clear the room. The wind blows through it. You see only its emptiness, you search in every corner and don’t find yourself.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923
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“Should I be grateful or should I curse the fact that despite all misfortune I can still feel love, an unearthly love but still for earthly objects.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923
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“Life's splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries of Franz Kafka 1914-1923
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“Nervous states of the worst sort control me without pause. Everything that is not literature bores me and I hate it. I lack all aptitude for family life except, at best, as an observer. I have no family feeling and visitors make me almost feel as though I were maliciously being attacked.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923
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“Being alone has a power over me that never fails. My interior dissolves (for the time being only superficially) and is ready to release what lies deeper. When I am willfully alone, a slight ordering of my interior begins to take place and I need nothing more.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923
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“The person I am in the company of my sisters has been entirely different from the person I am in the company of other people. Fearless, powerful, surprising, moved as I otherwise am only when I write.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923
tags: feminism
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“2 November. This morning, for the first time in a long time, the joy again of imagining a knife twisted in my heart.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923
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“My condition is not unhappiness, but it is also not happiness, not indifference, not weakness, not fatigue, not another interest – so what is it then?”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923
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“I feel an unhappiness which almost dismembers me, and at the same time am convinced of its necessity”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923
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“It would be very unjust to say that you deserted me, but that I was deserted, and sometimes terribly so, is true.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923
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“the poisonous world flows into my mouth like water into that of a drowning man”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923
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“There sat I, a faded being, under faded leaves.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923
tags: diaries
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“I am fond of lovers but I cannot love, I am too far away, am banished,”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923
tags: diaries, lovers
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“Lost among these entirely strange people.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923
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“My doubts stand in a circle around every word, I see them before I see the word, but what then! I do not see the word at all, I invent it.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries of Franz Kafka 1914-1923
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“There can be no more beautiful spot to die in, no spot more worthy of total despair, than one’s own novel.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923
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“My job is unbearable to me because it conflicts with my only desire and my only calling, which is literature. Since I am nothing but literature and can and want to be nothing else, my job will never take possession of me, it may, however, shatter me completely, and this is by no means a remote possibility.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923
tags: literature
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“Don't you want to join us?" I was recently asked by an acquaintance when he ran across me alone after midnight in a coffeehouse that was already almost deserted. "No, I don't," I said.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923
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“Don't despair, not even over the fact that you don't despair. Just when everything seems over with, new forces come marching up, and precisely that means that you are alive. And if they don't, then everything is over with here, once and for all.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923
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“But I will write in spite of everything, absolutely; it is my struggle for self-preservation.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923
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“I didn’t want any new clothes at all; because if I had to look ugly anyway, I wanted to at least be comfortable. I let the awful clothes affect even my posture, walked around with my back bowed, my shoulders drooping, my hands and arms all over the place. I was afraid of mirrors, because they showed an inescapable ugliness.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923
tags: afraid, body-dysmorphic-disorder, clothes, mirrors, ugliness
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“Always only the desire to die and the not-yet-yielding; this alone is love.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923
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“There am I. I cannot leave. I have nothing to complain about. I do not suffer excessively, for I do not suffer consistently, it does not pile up, at least I do not feel it for the time being, and the degree of my suffering is far less than the suffering that is perhaps my due.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923
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“Peaceful moon. I consist only of bones.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923
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“If something good has lost its way into you, it will make its escape overnight. I know you.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923
tags: cynicism
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“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.”
― Franz Kafka , Diaries, 1910-1923
tags: depression, despair, hope
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“I ought to be able to invent words capable of blowing the odor of corpses in a direction other than straight into mine and the reader's face.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923
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