The thornbush is the old obstacle in the road. It must catch fire if you want to go further.

I dream of a grave, deep and narrow, where we could clasp each other in our arms as with clamps, and I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more

You see, I have only such a fugitive awareness of things around me that I always feel they were once real and are now fleeting away.

If there is a transmigration of souls then I am not yet on the bottom rung. My life is a hesitation before birth.

No one can crave what truly harms him.

Life is merely terrible; I feel it as few others do. Often — and in my inmost self perhaps all the time — I doubt whether I am a human being.

If this is what you came for, then I didn't send for you. Kafka (note to himself in journal)