Quotes To Remember

||Chapter Forty-Six|| The one with the beautiful minds

This chapter is going to be structured a little differently than the others. I chose a couple people who I think deserve to have a section just for their amazing thoughts. So here goes.

Franz Kafka

1. “Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.” 

2. “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” 

3. “Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.” 

4. “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.” 

5. “A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity." [Letter to Max Brod, July 5, 1922]

6. “I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.” [The Metamorphosis]

7. “I am in chains. Don't touch my chains.” 

8. “There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe ... but not for us.” 

9. “I need solitude for my writing; not 'like a hermit' - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man.” 

10. “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?” 

11. “The truth is always an abyss. One must — as in a swimming pool — dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later rise again — laughing and fighting for breath — to the now doubly illuminated surface of things.” 

12. “Just think how many thoughts a blanket smothers while one lies alone in bed, and how many unhappy dreams it keeps warm.” 

13. “He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived.” 

14. “May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.” 

15. “Alas," said the mouse, "the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into."

"You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up.

16. “I never wish to be easily defined. I’d rather float over other people’s minds as something strictly fluid and non-perceivable; more like a transparent, paradoxically iridescent creature rather than an actual person.”