A lot of the stuff Kafka said he thought was hilariously funny.

I am not my childhood,' Snowman says out loud.

Good writing takes place at intersections, at what you might call knots, at places where the society is snarled or knotted up.

We want to get there faster. Get where? Wherever we are not. But a human soul can only go as fast as a man can walk, they used to say. In that case, where are all the souls? Left behind. They wander here and there, slowly, dim lights flickering in the marshes at night, looking for us. But they're not nearly fast enough, not for us, we're way ahead of them, they'll never catch up. That's why we can go so fast: our souls don't weigh us down.

We do not know how we'd behave. But a lot of people facing fascism didn't become fascists. I don't happen to believe that we are all monsters.

It was like being in an elevator cut loose at the top. Falling, falling, and not knowing when you will hit.

The best way of being kind to bears is not to be very close to them.