Kafka spent eight months in Zürau, in the Bohemian countryside […] The tuberculosis had declared itself a month before, when he coughed up blood in the night. The sick man didn’t hide a certain sense of relief. Writing to Felix Weltsch, he compared himself to the ‘happy lover’ who exclaims: ‘All the previous times were but illusions, only now do I truly love’. Illness was the final lover, which allowed him to close the old accounts.
— Roberto Calasso, K. (tr. G. Brock)
Posted in Kafka, Roberto Calasso
You are the exercise, the task. No student far and wide.
— Kafka, The Zürau Aphorisms (tr. M. Hofmann)
Posted in Kafka
Of all things one feels, nothing gives the impression of being at the very heart of truth so much as fits of unaccountable despair; compared to these, everything seems frivolous, debased, lacking in substance and interest.
— Cioran (via here)
In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were.
— Faulkner (via here)
All that sort of thing could be put up with, it belonged to the ordinary continual petty annoyances of life, it was nothing compared with what K. was striving for, and he had not come here simply to lead an honoured and comfortable life.
— Kafka, The Castle (tr. W. and E. Muir)
Posted in Kafka
Notes from a Room 