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That conversation with the taxi driver suddenly made clear to me the essence of the writer's occupation. We write books because our children aren't in...more

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I understand you, and I shall not attempt to make you change your mind. I am too old to want to improve the world. I have told you what I think, and t...more

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Betrayal means breaking ranks and going off into the unknown. Sabina knew of nothing more magnificent than going off into the unknown.

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When he told F. of his disgust at the eyelid's movement, he must have been sixteen. When he decided to study medicine, he must have been nineteen; by ...more

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The method of addition is quite charming if it involves adding to the self such things as a cat, a dog, roast pork, love of the sea or of cold showers...more

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Without asking her permission, someone is trying to intrude her life, draw her attention, in short, to bother her.

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Darling, my darling, don't think that I don't love you or that I didn't love you, but it's precisely because I love you that I couldn't have become wh...more

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Agnes subtracts from her self everything that is exterior and borrowed, in order to come closer to her sheer essence (even with the risk that zero lur...more

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Not everything written on Kafka is Kafkology. How then to define Kafkology? By a tautology: Kafkology is discourse for Kafkologizing Kafka. For replac...more

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a small nation resembles a big family and likes to describe itself that way. In the language of the smallest European people, in Icelandic, the term f...more

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(...) the woman we love ought to swim as slowly as we do, she ought to have no past of her own to look back on happily. But when the illusion of absol...more

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Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding...more

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Who was the real me? I can only repeat: I was a man of many faces.At meetings I was earnest, enthusiastic, and committed; among friends, unconstrained...more

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Noise has one advantage. It drowns out words. And suddenly he realized that all his life he had done nothing but talk, write, lecture, concoct sentenc...more