Best thing to happen for a poet. A fine death, no? An impressive death.

It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors.

There is no intellectual exercise which is not ultimately useless.

Your unforgivable sins do not allow you to see my splendor.

The future is as irrevocable as an inflexible yesterday.

Then he reflected that reality does not usually coincide with our anticipation of it; with a logic of his own he inferred that to forsee a circumstantial detail is to prevent its happening. Trusting in this weak magic, he invented, so that they would not happen, the most gruesome details.

In the critic's vocabulary, the word "precursor" is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotations of polemic or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future." -- Essay: "Kafka and his Precursors