Good vibrations..

We are as forlorn as children lost in the wood. When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours? And if I were to cast myself down before you and tell you, what more would you know about me that you know about hell when someone tells you it is hot and dreadful?

Let me remind you of the old maxim: people under suspicion are better moving than at rest, since at rest they may be sitting in the balance without knowing it, being weighed together with their sins.

I think we ought to only read the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it 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 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. That is my belief.

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

What if I slept a little more and forgot about all this nonsense.

It is often safer to be in chains than to be free.

“Life has no meaning a priori … It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose.”

Jean Paul Sartre

“The meaning of life is that it stops.”

Franz Kafka

“Logic is doubtless unshakable, but it cannot withstand a man who wants to go on living.”

F. Kafka, The Trial

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

“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.”

F. Kafka

” He sees life very differently from other people…To him any job—even his own—is as mysterious, as marvelous, as a locomotive is to a small child.  The simplest things in the world are beyond him…Yes, this whole world is and remains a puzzle to him, a mystery.  Something utterly beyond him, but which with his touchingly pure naiveté he admires for its efficiency… Franz can’t live.  He is incapable of living.  Franz will never get well.  Franz will die soon.” 

Milena Jesenska

“So long as you have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being.” - Kafka

“I am going to outlive myself. Eat, sleep, sleep, eat. Exist slowly, softly, like these trees, like a puddle of water, like the red bench in the streetcar.”-  Sartre

Hiding places there are innumerable, escape is only one, but possibilities of escape, again, are as many as hiding places.

One is alone, a total stranger and only an object of curiosity. And so long as you say “one” instead of “I,” there’s nothing in it and one can easily tell the story; but as soon as you admit to yourself that it is you yourself, you feel as though transfixed and are horrified.