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Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) was a Bohemian-Jewish novelist, and one of the major German-language fiction writers of the 20th century.

 * See also: The Zürau Aphorisms

Quotes

 * Verlassen sind wir doch wie verirrte Kinder im Walde. Wenn Du vor mir stehst und mich ansiehst, was weißt Du von den Schmerzen, die in mir sind und was weiß ich von den Deinen. Und wenn ich mich vor Dir niederwerfen würde und weinen und erzählen, was wüßtest Du von mir mehr als von der Hölle, wenn Dir jemand erzählt, sie ist heiß und fürchterlich. Schon darum sollten wir Menschen vor einander so ehrfürchtig, so nachdenklich, so liebend stehn wie vor dem Eingang zur Hölle.
 * We are as forlorn as children lost in the woods. 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 weep and tell you, what more would you know about me than you know about Hell when someone tells you it is hot and dreadful? For that reason alone we human beings ought to stand before one another as reverently, as reflectively, as lovingly, as we would before the entrance to Hell.
 * Letter to Oskar Pollak (8 November 1903); cited from Briefe, 1902-1924 (1958) edited by [Max Brod]], p. 27 ; translation from Franz Kafka, Representative Man (1991) by Frederick R. Karl, p. 98

 * Ich glaube, man sollte überhaupt nur solche Bücher lesen, die einen beißen und stechen. Wenn das Buch, das wir lesen, uns nicht mit einem Faustschlag auf den Schädel weckt, wozu lesen wir dann das Buch? Damit es uns glücklich macht, wie Du schreibst? Mein Gott, glücklich wären wir eben auch, wenn wir keine Bücher hätten, und solche Bücher, die uns glücklich machen, könnten wir zur Not selber schreiben. Wir brauchen aber die Bücher, die auf uns wirken wie ein Unglück, das uns sehr schmerzt, wie der Tod eines, den wir lieber hatten als uns, wie wenn wir in Wälder verstoßen würden, von allen Menschen weg, wie ein Selbstmord, ein Buch muß die Axt sein für das gefrorene Meer in uns. Das glaube ich.
 * I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? ...we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.
 * Letter to Oskar Pollak (27 January 1904)
 * Variant translations:
 * If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skulls, then why do we read it? Good God, we also would be happy if we had no books and such books that make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. What we must have are those books that come on us like ill fortune, like the death of one we love better than ourselves, like suicide. A book must be an ice axe to break the sea frozen inside us.
 * What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.
 * A book should be an ice-axe to break the frozen sea within us.
 * A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.
 * A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.

 * Now the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence... Someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence, certainly never.
 * "The Silence of the Sirens" (October 1917)

 * "The bliss of murder! The relief, the soaring ecstasy from the shedding of another’s blood! Wese, old nightbird, friend, alehouse crony, you are oozing away into the dark earth below the street. Why aren’t you simply a bladder of blood so that I could stamp on you and make you vanish into nothingness? Not all we want comes true, not all the dreams that blossomed have borne fruit, your solid remains lie here, already indifferent to every kick. What’s the good of the dumb question you are asking?"
 * "A Fratricide" (1917)

 * Plenty of hope — for God — no end of hope — only not for us.
 * In conversation with Max Brod (1920), after Brod had queried on there being "hope outside this manifestation of the world that we know", as quoted in Franz Kafka: A Biography [Franz Kafka, eine Biographie] (1937) by Max Brod, as translated by G. Humphreys Roberts and Richard Winston (1947; 1960); at least as early as Franz Kafka : Parable and Paradox (1962) by Heinz Politzer, this assertion has often appeared paraphrased as: "There is hope, but not for us", and sometimes "There is hope — only not for us."
 * Variant translations:
 * Oh, plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope — but not for us.
 * As translated in Weimar Intellectuals and the Threat of Modernity (1988) by Dagmar Barnouw, p. 187
 * First appeared in Brod, Max. "Der Dichter Franz Kafka." Die neue Rundschau 11 (1921): 1210-1216.
 * Ich erinnere mich eines Gesprächs mit Kafka, das vom heutigen Europa und dem Verfall der Menschheit ausging.“ Wir sind“, so sagte er, „ nihilistische Gedanken, Selbstmordgedanken, die in Gottes Kopf aufsteigen“. Mich erinnerte das zuerst an das Weltbild der Gnosis: Gott als böser Demiurg, die Welt sein Sündenfall. „O nein,“ meinte er, „unsere Welt ist nur eine schlechte Laune Gottes, ein schlechter Tag.“ — „So gäbe es außerhalb dieser Erscheinungsform Welt, die wir kennen, Hoffnung?“ — Er lächelte: „Oh, Hoffnung genug, unendlich viel Hoffnung, — nur nicht für uns.“
 * I remember a conversation with Kafka that started with today's Europe and the decline of humanity. "We are," he said, "nihilistic thoughts, suicidal thoughts that rise up in God's head." At first, that reminded me of the world view of Gnosticism: God as an evil demiurge, the world as his fall from grace. "Oh no," he said, "our world is just a bad mood of God, a bad day." - "So is there hope outside of this manifestation of the world that we know?" - He smiled: "Oh, hope enough, infinite hope - just not for us."

The Metamorphosis (1915)

 * Full text online

 * Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer verwandelt.
 * As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into an enormous insect.
 * First lines
 * Variant translation (by David Wyllie): One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin.

 * What a fate: to be condemned to work for a firm where the slightest negligence at once gave rise to the gravest suspicion! Were all the employees nothing but a bunch of scoundrels, was there not among them one single loyal devoted man who, had he wasted only an hour or so of the firm's time in the morning, was so tormented by conscience as to be driven out of his mind and actually incapable of leaving his bed?

 * How about if I sleep a little bit longer and forget all this nonsense.

 * "Hey, there’s something falling down in there," said the chief clerk. Gregor tried to suppose to himself that what had happened to him might some day also happen to the chief clerk. There was no denying that anything was possible.

 * I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.

 * Was he an animal, that music could move him so? He felt as if the way to the unknown nourishment he longed for were coming to light.

 * He thought back on his family with deep emotion and love. His conviction that he would have to disappear was, if possible, even firmer than his sister's. He remained in this state of empty and peaceful reflection until the tower clock struck three in the morning. He still saw that outside the window everything was beginning to grow light. Then, without his consent, his head sank down to the floor, and from his nostrils streamed his last weak breath.

The Trial (1920)

 * Published as Der Prozess (1925); full text online

 * Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning. His landlady's cook, who always brought him his breakfast at eight o'clock, failed to appear on this occasion. That had never happened before.
 * First lines, Ch. 1
 * Variant translation: Somebody must have slandered Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.
 * It would have been so pointless to kill himself that, even if he had wanted to, the pointlessness would have made him unable.
 * Ch. 1

 * They're talking about things of which they don't have the slightest understanding, anyway. It's only because of their stupidity that they're able to be so sure of themselves.
 * Ch. 1

 * This question of yours, Sir, about my being a house painter — or rather, not a question, you simply made a statement — is typical of the whole character of this trial that is being foisted on me. You may object that it is not a trial at all; you are quite right, for it is only a trial if I recognize it as such. But for the moment I do recognize it, on grounds of compassion, as it were. One can't regard it except with compassion, if one is to regard it at all. I do not say that your procedure is contemptible, but I should like to present that epithet to you for your private consumption.
 * Josef K. in Ch. 2
 * Variant translation: Your question, Mr. Examining Magistrate, as to whether I am a house-painter — although you did not ask a question at all, you made a statement — typifies exactly the kind of proceedings that are being instituted against me.

 * The right understanding of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude each other.

 * What an obstacle had suddenly arisen to block K.'s career! And this was the moment when he was supposed to work for the bank? He looked down at his desk. This the time to interview clients and negotiate with them? While his case was unfolding itself, while up in the attics the Court officials were poring over the charge papers, was he to devote his attention to the affairs of the bank? It looked like a kind of torture sanctioned by the Court, arising from his case and concomitant with it.
 * Ch. 7

 * Even that has its reason; it is often better to be in chains than to be free.
 * Ch. 8

 * '...it is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary.' 'A melancholy conclusion,' said K. 'It turns lying into a universal principle.In the Cathedral
 * Chapter 9

 * Logic may indeed be unshakeable, but it cannot withstand a man who is determined to live. Where was the judge he had never seen? Where was the High Court he had never reached? He raised his hands and spread out all his fingers. But the hands of one of the men closed round his throat, just as the other drove the knife deep into his heart and turned it twice.
 * Ch. 10

 * "Like a dog!" he said, it was as if the shame of it should outlive him.
 * Ch. 10, end of the book

The Castle (1926)

 * I dream of a grave, deep and narrow, where we could clasp each other in our arms as with clamps, and I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more

 * One must fight to get to the top, especially if one starts at the bottom.

 * There's no quiet place here on earth for our love, not in the village and not anywhere else, so I picture a grave, deep and narrow, in which we embrace as if clamped together, I bury my face against you, you yours against me, and no one will ever see us.

 * If a man has his eyes bound, you can encourage him as much as you like to stare through the bandage, but he'll never see anything

Parables and Paradoxes (1946)

 * Many statements from this work are in the earlier section "Aphorisms" (1918)

 * The whole visible world is perhaps nothing more than than the rationalization of a man who wants to find peace for a moment. An attempt to falsify the actuality of knowledge, to regard knowledge as a goal still to be reached.
 * "Paradise"

 * The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after his arrival; he will come, not on the last day, but on the very last day.
 * Variant translation: The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after his arrival; he will come, not on the last day, but at the very last.

The Diaries of Franz Kafka 1910-1923 (1948)

 * Edited by Max Brod

 * I can prove at any time that my education tried to make another person out of me than the one I became. It is for the harm, therefore, that my educators could have done me in accordance with their intentions that I reproach them; I demand from their hands the person I now am, and since they cannot give him to me, I make of my reproach and laughter a drumbeat sounding in the world beyond.
 * (July 1910)

 * "Don't you want to join us?" I was recently asked by an acquaintance when he ran across me alone after midnight in a coffeehouse that was already almost deserted. "No, I don't," I said.
 * (June 1914)

It is entirely conceivable that life’s splendour forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. '''If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come. This is the essence of magic, which does not create but summons.'''
 * Eternal childhood. Life calls again.
 * (18 October 1921)

 * Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate — he has little success in this — but with his other hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins, for he sees different (and more) things than do the others; after all, dead as he is in his own lifetime, he is the real survivor. This assumes that he does not need both hands, or more hands than he has, in his struggle against despair.
 * (19 October 1921)

Letters to Milena (1952)

 * Letters to Milena Jesenská, first published in Briefe an Milena (1952)

Auch ist es vielleicht nicht eigentlich Liebe wenn ich sage, daß Du mir das Liebste bist; Liebe ist, daß Du mir das Messer bist, mit dem ich in mir wühle.'' Moreover, perhaps it isn’t love when I say you are what I love the most — you are the knife I turn inside myself, this is love.
 * ''Hat matt nicht die Augen, um sich sie auszureißen und das Herz zum gleichen Zweck? Dabei ist es ja nicht so schlimm, das ist Übertreibung und Lüge, alles ist Übertreibung, nur die Sehnsucht ist wahr, die kann man nicht übertreiben. Aber selbst die Wahrheit der Sehnsucht ist nicht so sehr ihre Wahrheit, als vielmehr der Ausdruck der Lüge alles übrigen sonst. Es klingt verdreht, aber es ist so.
 * Aren’t our eyes made to be torn out, and our hearts for the same purpose? At the same time it’s really not that bad; that’s an exaggeration and a lie, everything is exaggeration, the only truth is longing, which cannot be exaggerated. But even the truth of longing is not so much its own truth; it’s really an expression of everything else, which is a lie. This sounds crazy and distorted, but it’s true.
 * Letter to Milena Jesenská (14 September 1920)
 * Variant translations:
 * In this love you are like a knife, with which I explore myself.

The Blue Octavo Notebooks (1954)

 * The history of mankind is the instant between two strides taken by a traveler.

 * The thornbush is old obstacle in the road. It must catch fire if you want to go further.

 * There was once a community of scoundrels, that is to say, they were not scoundrels, but ordinary people.

 * Anyone who believes cannot experience miracles. By day one does not see any stars. Anyone who does miracles says: I cannot let go of the earth.
 * 21 November 1917
 * Variant translation: Anyone who believes cannot experience miracles. By day one cannot see any stars.

 * Religions get lost as people do.

 * Idleness is the beginning of all vice, the crown of all virtues.

 * Das Böse weiß vom Guten, aber das Gute vom Bösen nicht. Selbsterkenntnis hat nur das Böse. - Die Acht Oktavhefte; published by BookRix, 9-8-2014.
 * Translation: Evil knows of the Good, but Good does not know of Evil. Knowledge of oneself is something only Evil has. - The First Octavo Notebook

Franz Kafka: A Biography (1960)

 * Quotes from Franz Kafka: A Biography (1960) by Max Brod (expanding on earlier editions of 1937 and 1947), as translated by G. Humphreys Roberts and Richard Winston ISBN 0306806703

 * Now at last I can look at you in peace, I don't eat you anymore.
 * Comment to a fish, after becoming a vegetarian, p. 74

 * What is meant by its nature for the highest and the best, spreads among the lowly people.
 * p. 74

The Complete Stories (1971)

Another said: I bet that is also a parable. The first said: You have won. The second said: But unfortunately only in parable. The first said: No, in reality: in parable you have lost.
 * A man once said: Why such reluctance? If you only followed the parables you yourselves would become parables and with that rid of all your daily cares.
 * "On Parables" (1922), translation by Willa and Edwin Muir

 * "Everything you say is boring and incomprehensible," she said, "but that alone doesn't make it true."
 * "Description of a Struggle".

 * "Oh well, memories,” said I. “Yes, even remembering in itself is sad, yet how much more its object! Don’t let yourself in for things like that, it’s not for you and it’s not for me. It only weakens one’s present position without strengthening the former one — nothing is more obvious — quite apart from the fact that the former one doesn’t need strengthening."
 * "Description of a Struggle"

 * When . . . some leisurely passer-by stopped . . . and spoke of cheating, that was in its way the stupidest lie ever invented by indifference and inborn malice, since it was not the hunger artist who was cheating, he was working honestly, but the world was cheating him of his reward.
 * "A Hunger Artist"

 * To fight against this lack of understanding, against a whole world of non-understanding, was impossible.
 * "A Hunger Artist"

 * "I always wanted you to admire my fasting," said the hunger artist. "We do admire it," said the overseer, affably. "But you shouldn't admire it," said the hunger artist. "Well then we don't admire it," said the overseer, "but why shouldn't we admire it?" "Because I have to fast, I can't help it," said the hunger artist. "What a fellow you are," said the overseer, "and why can't you help it?" "Because," said the hunger artist, lifting his head a little and speaking, with his lips pursed, as if for a kiss, right into the overseer's ear, so that no syllable might be lost, "because I couldn't find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else." These were his last words, but in his dimming eyes remained the firm though no longer proud persuasion that he was still continuing to fast.
 * "A Hunger Artist"

 * How much my life has changed, and yet how unchanged it has remained at bottom! When I think back and recall the time when I was still a member of the canine community, sharing in all its preoccupations, a dog among dogs, I find on closer examination that from the very beginning I sensed some discrepancy, some little maladjustment, causing a slight feeling of discomfort which not even the most decorous public functions could eliminate; more, that sometimes, no, not sometimes, but very often, the mere look of some fellow dog of my own circle that I was fond of, the mere look of him, as if I had just caught it for the first time, would fill me with helpless embarrassment and fear, even with despair.
 * "Investigations of a Dog"

 * All knowledge, the totality of all questions and all answers, is contained in the dog. If one could but realize this knowledge, if one could but bring it into the light of day, if we dogs would but own that we know infinitely more than we admit to ourselves!
 * "Investigations of a Dog"

 * Ours is a lost generation, it may be, but it is more blameless than those earlier generations.
 * "Investigations of a Dog"

 * So long as you have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being.
 * "Investigations of a Dog"

 * "You asking me the way?" "Yes," I said, "since I can't find it myself." "Give it up! Give it up!" said he, and turned with a sudden jerk, like someone who wants to be alone with his laughter.
 * Variant translation: The Policeman said to me, "You want to know the way? Give up! Just give up!" And he turned away like a man that wants to be alone with his laughter.

Attributed

 * We met a large group of workmen who were marching with flags and banners to a meeting. Kafka said, "These people are so self-possessed, so self-confident and good humoured. They rule the streets, and therefore think they rule the world. In fact, they are mistaken. Behind them already are the secretaries, officials, professional politicians, all the modern satraps for whom they are preparing the way to power." "You do not believe in the power of the masses?" "It is before my eyes, this power of the masses, formless and apparently chaotic, which then seeks to be given a form and a discipline. At the end of every truly revolutionary development there appears a Napoleon Bonaparte." "You don"t believe in a wider expansion of the Russian Revolution?" Kafka was silent for a moment, then he said: "As a flood spreads wider and wider, the water becomes shallower and dirtier. The Revolution evaporates, and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy. The chains of tormented mankind are made out of red tape."
 * Gustav Janouch, Conversations With Kafka: Notes and Reminiscences (1953), page 71, London: Derek Verschoyle; frequently quoted as "Every revolution evaporates, and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy."

Misattributed

 * By believing passionately in something which still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.
 * Attributed to Kafka in Ambiguous Spaces (2008) by NaJa & deOstos (Nannette Jackowski and Ricardo de Ostos), p. 7, and a couple other publications since, this is actually from Report to Greco (1965) by Nikos Kazantzakis, p. 434
 * 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.
 * Attributed to Kafka by numerous sources, confirmed to be from Anne Rice.
 * One idiot is one idiot. Two idiots are two idiots. Ten thousand idiots are a political party.
 * Was written in a slightly different way by Leo Longanesi in Italian, above form has been attributed to Kafka without evidence.

Quotes about Kafka

 * Sorted alphabetically by author or source

 * It’s strange that my work has been classified as magic realism because I see my novels as just being realistic literature. They say that if Kafka had been born in Mexico he would have been a realistic writer. So much depends on where you were born.
 * Isabel Allende Interview

 * Kafka was a Jew in his heart and soul. He learned Hebrew and Yiddish. He attended a beit midrash in Frankfurt and he wanted to settle in Palestine. He had lots of women, but most of them were Jewish. I don't mean that he proclaimed his Jewishness every morning, but that he was connected with Jewishness in every sense of the word. For example, the pounding at the castle — the desire to enter and understand this mystery — is a very Jewish longing. For good reason, authors such as his colleague Max Brod tried to find kabbalistic meaning in his works. Consider, for example, his two greatest works, The Trial and The Castle. He felt that he was a defendant who had done no wrong. A man is sitting at home or in a pension, looking forward to breakfast, and suddenly someone comes in and says, “You're under arrest! You are accused!” for no reason and no purpose. That's the classic Jewish situation, manifested most acutely during the Holocaust. It was a situation of total guilt with no sin. People were accused, taken from their homes, shut up in ghettos, led to railroad stations and from there to extermination camps — not because they had done anything wrong but because Jewish blood flowed in their veins. Kafka illustrated the absurdity of Jewish life in Europe even before the Holocaust. In this sense Kafka grasped the lowly position Jews held in European civilization...Kafka performed a psychic analysis of the defendant. Although he refrained from mentioning the Jew explicitly in order to give this absurd situation a much broader meaning, this, in essence, is Jewish psychology. A Jewish fate, if you will. Interestingly, this analysis led him indirectly to Zionism, and he even wanted to settle in Palestine.
 * Aharon Appelfeld Interview (1998) translated from Hebrew

 * But beneath its reasonably serene surface, the website can be as ugly and bitter as 4chan and as mind-numbingly bureaucratic as a Kafka story.
 * David Auerbach "Encyclopedia Frown Wikipedia is amazing. But it’s become a rancorous, sexist, elitist, stupidly bureaucratic mess." (December 11, 2014)

 * He is interested in the feelings of the squash ball, and of the champagne bottle that launches the ship. In a football match his sympathy is not with either of the teams but with the ball, or, in a match ending nil-nil, with the hunger of the goalmouth.
 * Alan Bennett, Writing Home (1994), p. 336

 * Kafka described with wonderful imaginative power the future concentration camps, the future instability of the law, the future absolutism of the state Apparat.
 * Bertolt Brecht, as quoted in Time (18 July 1983)

 * The whole art of Kafka consists in forcing the reader to re-read. His endings or his absence of endings, suggest explanations which, however, are not revealed in clear language but, before they seem justified, require that the story be reread.
 * Albert Camus, Hope and The Absurd in the Work of Franz Kafka.

 * The way in which he experienced estrangement was literature, with an intensity greater than that of any other writer of this century, more inexorably than Joyce or Proust or Mann. From this experience flows the power of Kafka’s works to comprehend all forms of alienation, and to suggest a response to political estrangement different from political counterterror: the effort to illuminate this condition by grasping through literature that play is the reward for the courage of accepting death.
 * Stanley Corngold, as quoted in the Introduction of The Metamorphosis (1972), p. xxi

 * He writes about his father, but he is actually writing a diatribe against the fascist state, against a Germanized Prague. It is minor literature because he is Jewish and a Czech writing in German; he is writing the reverse side of history. And that is what literature gives you: the reverse side of history.
 * Rosario Ferré Interview (2002)

 * I would like to say something about how I feel in general about what a novel, or any story, ought to be. It’s a quotation from Kafka. He said, “A book ought to be an ax to break up the frozen sea within us.”
 * Nadine Gordimer Interview with The Paris Review (1979/80)

 * Kafka said of writing that "the more independent it becomes, the more incalculable, the more joyful, the more ascendant its course.
 * 1983 interview in ''Conversations with Nadine Gordimer edited by Nancy Topping Bazin and Marilyn Dallman Seymour (1990)

 * "The pen," said Kafka to Janouch, "is not an instrument but an organ of the writer's."
 * Josephine Herbst "The Ruins of Memory" (April 4, 1956) in The Nation

 * It is mainly Jewish readers who think of Kafka as a Jewish writer. This isn’t a matter of possessiveness, the way one claims a sports hero for an ethnic group — after all, if one wanted to claim a writer to carry the Jews into world literature, would it be asking too much to pick someone, well, happier? — but rather a matter of Kafka’s work itself. Jewish readers cannot help but hear the echoes of the Dreyfus Affair in “In the Penal Colony,” or those of the blood libel in “The Trial”; such readers see in Kafka’s famous cockroach a horrifying caricature of the way others have so often seen them — and worse, the way they sometimes see themselves. Nor is this awareness mere suspicion. Though none of his published works mention it explicitly, Kafka’s private letters and diaries reveal an interest in Jewish identity verging on obsession. But Kafka’s broader fame comes from the point where this obsession merges with more ordinary fears, making non-Jewish readers see his work as expressing an abstract “existential” dread, rather than the very real dread that defined European Jewish existence.
 * Dara Horn "Kafka, Divided and Onstage" in The Forward (October 20, 2006)

 * I’m interested in how power works … Franz Kafka just knows, man. He knows how power works. In terms of lessons for young writers, they should read all of Kafka’s journals. They’re so depressing yet so relatable at the same time. It seems like he had no faith in his work, and then you look at the work he produced … I don’t know. Maybe talking down to yourself is a way of keeping the faith.
 * Ling Ma attributed in article (2018)

 * One night [at college] a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka. I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line almost knocked me off the bed, I was so surprised. The first line reads, "As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect...." When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn't know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short stories.
 * Gabriel García Márquez Interview (1981)

 * The only way Kafka could envisage of creating his in every respect impossible writing possible was to demarcate the area of impossibility by making a language without a particular color, without a local tone, without qualities, as it were.
 * Marthe Robert, As Lonely as Kafka (1953)

 * it seems that Kafka is even more famous in Prague than President Havel. An entire Kafka industry has blossomed here. He is sold in every store: Kafka shirts, Kafka toys; beer mugs and pots with Kafka's picture. There are Kafka restaurants, cafeterias, theatres. He looks down at us from everywhere. Kafka, the sickly, alienated individualist, the Jew who never completely felt himself to be a citizen of the Jewish, the Czech, or the German worlds, has risen from the dead in the vulgarized form of a sort of Czech rock star.
 * Chava Rosenfarb "Laterna Magika, Prague 1993"  in Confessions of a Yiddish Writer and Other Essays, translated from the Yiddish with Goldie Morgentaler

 * The work of Kafka … has been subjected to a mass ravishment by no less than three armies of interpreters. Those who read Kafka as a social allegory see case studies of the frustrations and insanity of modern bureaucracy and its ultimate issuance in the totalitarian state. Those who read Kafka as a psychoanalytic allegory see desperate revelations of Kafka’s fear of his father, his castration anxieties, his sense of his own impotence, his thralldom to his dreams. Those who read Kafka as a religious allegory explain that K. in The Castle is trying to gain access to heaven, that Joseph K. in The Trial is being judged by the inexorable and mysterious justice of God.
 * Susan Sontag, in "Against Interpretation" (1964), in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966)

 * Kafka is enormously important. Years ago I wrote a Jewish travel guide to Prague and other cities in the region. At the time, I was really into Kafka. It comes out a little in my work now, probably more subconsciously than it did then. Then I was reading all of his Letters to Felice, I was nuts, literally, when I was living in Prague. It’s a cliché, I know. But to this day, everything we say about Kafka’s a cliché, since his writings are seen, with 20/20 hindsight, as a horrifying prediction of what was to come, both with the Holocaust and Soviet tyranny, living in a police state. But in terms of influence, there’s the horror and the grotesquery, the allegory and hyperbole, the elevation of pulpy narrative, the Jewish obsessions, the generational tensions, but also the humor. I mean, Kafka’s stories were also meant to be funny, which is something that is not often appreciated today. Philip Roth called him a “sit-down comic”...Culturally, working in this period of enormous transformation for Jews and in Europe more broadly, I found Kafka a sort of guide to turning history and memory into a narrative, into art that becomes even more compelling than the tradition it replaces. And there are specific things, like authenticity. Kafka was obsessed with Galician Jewish refugees in Prague at the beginning of World War I. He considered them to be the embodiment of authenticity. And in his diaries, he writes about them. He talks about how if he could be anybody in the world, he’d just want to be this little Jewish boy he remembered seeing, seemingly free of worry. He idealized them as true Jews, essentially. And that definitely stuck with me, because I’ve done similar things. I’m not proud of that, but we’re always trying to deprogram ourselves from what we have learned as authenticity when we were young.
 * Eli Valley Interview (2017)

title: Franz Kafka


text:
Lily Tomlin

Mary Jean "Lily" Tomlin (born 1 September 1939) is an American actress, comedian, writer, and producer who has been a major force in American comedy since the late 1960s, when she began a career as a stand-up comedian and became a featured performer on television's Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In. She is married to her longtime companion and collaborator Jane Wagner.

Quotes

 * And that's the truth!
 * Closing line of her skits as "Edith Ann", on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In (1969 - 1973), and in later productions.

 * I've seen these women all my life, I know how they walk, I know how they talk...
 * Response after being asked how she felt playing a heterosexual in Nashville, on her album Modern Scream (1975)

 * Truth is, I've always been selling out. The difference is that in the past, I looked like I had integrity because there were no buyers.
 * Modern Scream (1975)

 * There's so much plastic in this culture that vinyl leopard skin is becoming an endangered synthetic.
 * As Judith Beasley in ''The Incredible Shrinking Woman (1981)

 * What if it's boring... or if it's not boring, it might be too revealing, or worse, it might be too revealing and still be boring.
 * Referring to her teenage diary, in an interview in Movie magazine (July 1983)

 * I have always felt that humor was a wonderful vehicle to let us become connected with each other and ourselves… I try to portray the similarities and polarities in men and women, so that we can acknowledge and embrace our collective consciousness.
 * As quoted in Variety magazine (2003)

 * If you can't be direct, why be?
 * Recounting what a college classmate said to her when she was acting "insecure and wimpy", as quoted at Tomlin's official site.

Saturday Night Live (1975)

 * Saturday Night Live (25 November 1975)

 * Wouldn't it be great if we all grew up to be what we wanted to be? The world would be full of nurses, firemen, and ballerinas.

 * Why isn't there a special name for the tops of your feet?

The Advocate interview (2005)

 * Interview with Alonso Duralde, "Thoroughly modern Lily" (15 March 2005)

 * I feel some part of me can wake up and be very existential and the next day wake up and be sort of in love with the universe.

 * When you talk about yourself for 35 years, first of all, it gets repetitious. And then it seems a little bit excessive, at the least.

 * People think there's some real subversive thing playing against whoever it is; a lot of it is just people who want to go along and get along. And they also want to make money. And the bottom line is, they're going to put out as much stuff as they can — stupid, banal stuff that makes money.

 * The larger picture is really to swing people's awareness of what really is moral. ... There are great clergy-people who absolutely do not agree with this. It's not whether God is on our side or whether we're doing God's will, it's being so narcissistic as to think that God is telling you what to do.

 * We went to a Southern Baptist church. When I was a small child, until I was about 8 or 9 years old, I worried if I didn't go forward and get saved every Sunday — which I couldn't do, it was absolutely too humiliating to see these adults flailing and beating their breasts and sobbing, and I thought, Oh, my God, this is so ridiculous, so embarrassing — I could never bring myself to go forward. And I'd think, Oh, my God, if I don't go next Sunday, if the end of the world comes, I'll go to hell. And that's is a pretty hard thing for a 7- or 8-year-old to carry all the time

 * The point I want to make is, the idea that people will say — out of the 170,000 people or however many were killed in the tsunami — they'll say, "God saved me." As if God particularly saved this person. There's a tremendous amount of narcissism in that belief, that God is speaking directly to you. I mean, it's unbelievable. … All these disparate opinions and points of view that people say they're getting as direct divine guidance — I've been concerned for decades about presidents who claim to be born again. And knowing that everyone I knew in the fundamentalist church or in the evangelical Christian church — they wanted the rapture to come. … We don't have to save the environment, because we're not going to be around.

Metro Weekly interview (2006)

 * Interview with Randy Shulman in Metro Weekly (27 April 2006)

 * 9 to 5 made people aware of equal pay for equal work. It hasn't really happened, but it has come closer. We're aware of sexual harassment, and of course, there are very few companies that have daycare centers, which seems to me would be the most humane, positive thing to do for a worker. The worker would be more loyal, they'd be more productive. It's so crazy not to do the human thing. It seems to me to be much more profitable to do the human thing. It just makes a better society.

 * Jane took me to another level because she's truly a wonderful writer. I'd put things together in the past and struggled with them. And then I met Jane. … I was doing my Edith Ann album in '71 — the album came out in '72. She'd done a thing on television called J.T. — it was about a kid in Harlem — and she won a Peabody for it. I later learned it was the first thing she'd ever written. It was written as an After School Special, but they played it in prime time — and they played it every year after that for about 25 years, or something. Anyway, I saw it and it was wonderful. It was poetic and sensitive and satiric and tender and funny and so many things compressed into this one hour. And I thought, "Oh, God, this is exactly what I want in a monologue." So I wrote Jane and asked her to help me do the Edith Ann album. I didn't hear from her for a while. Then, suddenly, about a week before I was supposed to go in and record, she sent me a lot of material. I persuaded her to come to California and help me produce it. Frankly, I was pretty taken with her as soon as I saw her. We just sort of clicked. We became a couple right away.

 * I respect her talent and her brain and who she is as a person — and that kind of admiration and respect is a big factor in binding someone in a relationship. I know what a good heart she has, and how empathetic she is with all kinds of people and issues — she's so brilliant on top of it that she can voice these things. And she's as funny as she can possibly be. She makes me laugh.

 * Some journalists are just motivated by their own sense of what they want to say or what they feel comfortable saying or writing about. In '77, I was on the cover of Time. The same week I had a big story in Newsweek. In one of the magazines it says I live alone, and the other magazine said I live with Jane Wagner. Unless you were so really adamantly out, and had made some declaration at some press conference, people back then didn't write about your relationship.

 * Listen, I have no judgment about anything. Some people will bring certain celebrities up to me who are presumably — or known to be — gay and ask "Why don't they come out?" But we don't know why they don't, and it's none of our business, really. In '75 I was making the Modern Scream album, and Jane and I were in the studio. My publicist called me and said "Time will give you the cover if you'll come out." I was more offended than anything that they thought we'd make a deal. But that was '75 — it would have been a hard thing to do at that time.

 * It's a more ridiculing, divisive humor today, especially with the advent of political incorrectness, which is a license to be as ridiculing and awful about certain groups... There should be room for everybody, absolutely, and then the culture is going to decide the prevailing weight. We can't decide it individually. Nobody is here without a reason. … I always had a different sensibility. I like a huge range of comedy — from broad and farcical, the most sensitive, the most understated — but I always wanted my comedy to be more embracing of the species rather than debasing of it.

Contributions of Jane Wagner

 * Material in Tomlin's acts credited to Jane Wagner at Tomlin's classic site.

 * Don't be afraid of missing opportunities. Behind every failure is an opportunity somebody wishes they had missed.

 * For fast acting relief, try slowing down.

 * If love is the answer, could you please rephrase the question?

 * If the formula for water is H2O, is the formula for an ice cube H2O squared?

 * If truth is beauty, how come no one has their hair done in the library?

 * If you read a lot of books, you're considered well-read. But if you watch a lot of TV, you're not considered well-viewed.

 * Sometimes I worry about being a success in a mediocre world.

 * The best mind-altering drug is truth.

 * The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.

 * Why is it when we talk to God we're said to be praying — but when God talks to us, we're said to be schizophrenic?

 * Interviewer: You once said you had a drug problem... Lily: Yeah, I still do. It's so hard to find good grass these days.

As Edith Ann

 * I like a teacher who gives you something to take home to think about besides homework

The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe (1985)

 * As performed by Tomlin; written by Jane Wagner

 * Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.
 * As "Trudy"

 * Reality is the leading cause of stress amongst those in touch with it....
 * As "Trudy"

 * Reality is a crutch for people who can't cope with drugs.
 * As "Trudy"
 * Unsourced variant: Reality is a crutch for people who can't handle drugs.

 * When you're dancing the mystical dance of the molecules, you're not the one who's leading.
 * As "Trudy"

 * It's my belief we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain.
 * As "Trudy"
 * Unsourced variants: I personally think we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain. Man invented language to satisfy his deep inner need to complain.

 * If evolution was worth its salt, it should've evolved something better than "survival of the fittest." I think a better idea would be "survival of the wittiest." At least, that way, creatures that didn't survive could've died laughing.
 * As "Trudy"

 * All my life, I've always wanted to be somebody, but I see now I should have been more specific.
 * As "Chrissy"

 * If I had known what it would be like to have it all... I might have been willing to settle for less.
 * As "Lyn"

 * Sometimes I feel like a figment of my own imagination.
 * As "Chrissy"

 * No matter how cynical you become, it's never enough to keep up.
 * As Lily
 * Unsourced variant: No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up.

 * I bet the worst part about dying is the part where your whole life passes before you.

 * Your problem is your role models were models.

 * I swear people don't want sex so much as they want somebody who'll listen to 'em … the first thing you learn after fellatio is how to listen.

 * Remember we're all in this alone.

Quotes about

 * the contributions of people whom we may now identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender are integral and central to how we conceptualize our national history. Without the work of social activists, thinkers, writers, and artists such as We'Wha, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Martha "Calamity" Jane Cannary Burke, Edith Guerrier, Countee Cullen, Ethel Waters, Bayard Rustin, Roy Cohn, Robert Mapplethorpe, Cherrie Moraga, and Lily Tomlin, we would not have the country that we have today.
 * Michael Bronski A Queer History of the United States (2011)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Lily Tomlin


text:
G. Gordon Liddy

George Gordon Battle Liddy (born 30 November 1930 — March 30, 2021) was an American lawyer, FBI agent, talk show host, and actor. He was involved in the Watergate scandal as the chief operative in the White House Plumbers unit during the Nixon administration. Liddy was convicted of conspiracy, burglary, and illegal wiretapping for his role in Watergate.

Quotes

 * Obviously, crime pays, or there'd be no crime.
 * As quoted in "Does Crime Pay" in The Scandal Annual (1987) by the Paragon Project, p. 7

 * Now if the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms comes to disarm you and they are bearing arms, resist them with arms. Go for a head shot; they're going to be wearing bulletproof vests. ... They've got a big target on there, ATF. Don't shoot at that, because they've got a vest on underneath that. Head shots, head shots. ... Kill the sons of bitches.
 * Statements on his radio program (26 August 1994), as quoted in "Did MSNBC Know Liddy's History?", FAIR (29 April 2005)]

 * If the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms insists upon a firefight, give them a firefight. Just remember, they're wearing flak jackets and you're better off shooting for the head.
 * Statements on his radio program (15 September 1994), as quoted in "Did MSNBC Know Liddy's History?" at FAIR (29 April 2005)

 * What I did was restate the law. I was talking about a situation in which the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms comes smashing into a house, doesn't say who they are, and their guns are out, they're shooting, and they're in the wrong place. This has happened time and time again. The ATF has gone in and gotten the wrong guy in the wrong place. The law is that if somebody is shooting at you, using deadly force, the mere fact that they are a law enforcement officer, if they are in the wrong, does not mean you are obliged to allow yourself to be killed so your kinfolk can have a wrongful death action. You are legally entitled to defend yourself and I was speaking of exactly those kind of situations. If you're going to do that, you should know that they're wearing body armor so you should use a head shot. Now all I'm doing is stating the law, but all the nuances in there got left out when the story got repeated.
 * On his 1994 comments on taking head shots at ATF agents, as quoted in a 2003 interview at Right Wing News

 * A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money.
 * As quoted in "The Best Of The Rest: 20 More Quotes About Liberals" at Right Wing News (24 November 2010)

 * Suffering. That was the key.
 * Liddy, G. Gordon, Will: The Autobiography of G. Gordon Liddy (St. Martin's Press 1980), pg. 12, describing his epiphany about how to conquer fear.
 * Compare the fictional reply, attributed to Liddy in the film All the President's Men (1976), when asked how he could keep his hand over a lit candle until his flesh seared: "The trick is not minding."

Quotes about Liddy

 * He's basically a romantic comedian. …. He was a government agent entering our bedroom at midnight. We had every right to shoot him. But I've never owned a weapon in my life, and I have no intention of owning a weapon, although I was a master sharpshooter at West Point on both the Garand, the Springfield rifle and the machine-gun.
 * Timothy Leary, commenting on Liddy's 1994 remarks about shooting ATF agents, and a 1966 raid by Liddy in which Leary had been arrested, in "Timothy Leary Revisited" a 1995 interview, in Paul Krassner's Impolite Interviews (1999) by Paul Krassner, p. 304

 * Is it Liddy? Is that the fellow? He must be a little nuts. I mean he just isn’t well screwed on is he? Isn’t that the problem?
 * Richard Nixon, during the "smoking gun" meeting with H.R. Haldeman (June 1972)

title: G. Gordon Liddy


text:
Walter Benjamin

Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (15 July 1892 – 27 September 1940) was a German Jewish literary critic and philosopher. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory, and was also greatly inspired by the Marxism of Bertolt Brecht and the Jewish mysticism of Gershom Scholem.

Quotes

 * Nothing is so hateful to the philistine as the "dreams of his youth." ... For what appeared to him in his dreams was the voice of the spirit, calling him once, as it does everyone. It is of this that youth always reminds him, eternally and ominously. That is why he is antagonistic toward youth.
 * "Experience" (1913) as translated by L. Spencer and S. Jost, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 1 (1996), pp. 4-5

 * Because he never raises his eyes to the great and the meaningful, the philistine has taken experience as his gospel. It has become for him a message about life's commonness. But he has never grasped that there exists something other than experience, that there are values—inexperienceable—which we serve.
 * "Experience" (1913) as translated by L. Spencer and S. Jost, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 1 (1996), p. 4

 * In what time does man live? The thinkers have always known that he does not live in any time at all. The immortality of thoughts and deeds banishes him to a timeless realm at whose heart an inscrutable death lies in wait. ... Devoured by the countless demands of the moment, time slipped away from him; the medium in which the pure melody of his youth would swell was destroyed. The fulfilled tranquility in which his late maturity would ripen was stolen from him. It was purloined by everyday reality, which, with its events, chance occurrences, and obligations, disrupted the myriad opportunities of youthful time, immortal time. ... From day to day, second to second, the self preserves itself, clinging to that instrument: time, the instrument that it was supposed to play.
 * "The Metaphysics of Youth," in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 1 (1996), pp. 10-11

 * Jede Äußerung menschlichen Geisteslebens kann als eine Art der Sprache aufgefaßt werden, und diese Auffassung erschließt nach Art einer wahrhaften Methode überall neue Fragestellungen.
 * Every expression of human mental life can be understood as a kind of language, and this understanding, in the manner of a true method, everywhere raises new questions.
 * "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man" (1916), translated by E. Jephcott, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 1 (1996), p. 62

 * Zur Verknechtung der Sprache im Geschwätz tritt die Verknechtung der Dinge in der Narretei fast als deren unausbleibliche Folge.
 * The enslavement of language in prattle is joined by the enslavement of things in folly almost as its inevitable consequence.
 * "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man" (1916), translated by E. Jephcott, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 1 (1996), p. 72

 * I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.
 * Protocols to the Experiments on Hashish, Opium and Mescaline (1927-1934, English translation 1997)

 * Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness.
 * Protocols to the Experiments on Hashish, Opium and Mescaline (1927-1934)

 * … für den wahren Sammler ist die Erwerbung eines alten Buches dessen Wiedergeburt. … Die alte Welt erneuern – das ist der tiefste Trieb im Wunsch des Sammlers, Neues zu erwerben, und darum steht der Sammler älterer Bücher dem Quell des Sammelns näher als der Interessent für bibliophile Neudrucke. translation: … for the true collector, acquiring an old book is its rebirth. … Renewing the old world — this is the deepest drive in the collector's desire to acquire new things, and that is why the collector of older books is closer to the source of collecting than the person interested in bibliophile reprints.
 * Ich packe meine Bibliothek aus ("Unpacking my library", 1931), p. 2

 * Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. … Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.
 * Unpacking my Library: A Talk About Book Collecting (1931)

 * The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room. And only one activity: clearing away. His need for fresh air and open space is stronger than any hatred.
 * "The Destructive Character" Frankfurter Zeitung (20 November 1931)

 * Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. … For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have in the moment of recollection. This strange form — it may be called fleeting or eternal — is in neither case the stuff that life is made of.
 * A Berlin Chronicle (1932–, unfinished), in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings – vol. 2, pt. 2: 1931-1934, ed. Michael William Jennings, Harvard University Press, 2005, p. 612

 * Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the “authentic” print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics.
 * Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner Reproduzierbarkeit  The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935)

 * There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.
 * "The Task of the Translator," translated by Harry Zohn

The Life of Students (1915)

 * "Das Leben der Studenten," first published in Der neue Merkur, as translated by R. Livingstone, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings – vol. 1: 1913-1926, ed. Michael William Jennings, Harvard University Press, 1996, pp. 37-47

 * An das Leben der Studenten tritt die Frage nach seiner bewußten Einheit heran. ... Das Auszeichnende im Studentenleben ist in der Tat der Gegenwille, sich einem Prinzip zu unterwerfen, mit der Idee sich zu durchdringen. Der Name der Wissenschaft dient vorzüglich, eine tiefeingesessene, verbürgerte Indifferenz zu verbergen.
 * The question to address is that of the conscious unity of student life ... the will to submit to a principle, to identify completely with an idea. The concept of "science" or scholarly discipline serves primarily to conceal a deep-rooted bourgeois indifference.

 * Der Beruf folgt so wenig aus der Wissenschaft, dass sie ihn sogar ausschließen kann. Denn die Wissenschaft duldet ihrem Wesen nach keine Lösung von sich.
 * Scholarship, far from leading inexorably to a profession, may in fact preclude it. For it does not permit you to abandon it.

 * The true sign of decadence is not the collusion of the university and the state (something that is by no means incompatible with honest barbarity), but the theory and guarantee of academic freedom, when in reality people assume with brutal simplicity that the aim of study is to steer its disciples to a socially conceived individuality.

 * Everyone who achieves strives for totality, and the value of his achievement lies in that totality—that is, in the fact that the whole, undivided nature of a human being should be expressed in his achievement. But when determined by our society, as we see it today, achievement does not express a totality; it is completely fragmented and derivative. It is not uncommon for the community to be the site where a joint and covert struggle is waged against higher ambitions and more personal goals. ... The socially relevant achievement of the average person serves in the vast majority of cases to repress the original and nonderivative, inner aspirations of the human being.

The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism (1919)
"Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik" as translated by David Lachterman, Howard Eiland and Ian Balfour, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings – vol. 1: 1913-1926, ed. Michael William Jennings, Harvard University Press, 1996, pp. 116-200
 * Für die Romantiker und für die spekulative Philosophie bedeutete der Terminus kritisch: objektiv produktiv, schöpferisch aus Besonnenheit. Kritisch sein hieß die Erhebung des Denkens über alle Bindungen so weit treiben, daß gleichsam zauberisch aus der Einsicht in das Falsche der Bindungen die Erkenntnis der Wahrheit sich schwang.
 * For the Romantics and for speculative philosophy, ... to be critical meant to elevate thinking so far beyond all restrictive conditions that the knowledge of truth sprang forth magically, as it were, from insight into the falsehood of these restrictions.

 * The critic does not pass judgment on the work; rather, art itself passes judgment, either by taking up the work in the medium of criticism or by rejecting it and thereby appraising it as beneath all criticism.
 * p. 161

The Task of the Translator (1920)
"Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers," as translated by Rodney Livingstone, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings – vol. 1: 1913-1926, ed. Michael William Jennings, Harvard University Press, 1996, pp. 253-263

 * Nirgends erweist sich einem Kunstwerk oder einer Kunstform gegenüber die Rücksicht auf den Aufnehmenden für deren Erkenntnis fruchtbar. Nicht genug, dass jede Beziehung auf ein bestimmtes Publikum oder dessen Repräsentanten vom Wege abführt, ist sogar der Begriff eines "idealen" Aufnehmenden in allen kunsttheoretischen Erörterungen vom Übel, weil diese lediglich gehalten sind, Dasein und Wesen des Menschen überhaupt vorauszusetzen. So setzt auch die Kunst selbst dessen leibliches und geistiges Wesen voraus—seine Aufmerksamkeit aber in keinem ihrer Werke. Denn kein Gedicht gilt dem Leser, kein Bild dem Beschauer, keine Symphonie der Hörerschaft.
 * In the appreciation of a work of art or an art form, consideration of the receiver never proves fruitful. Not only is any reference to a particular public or its representatives misleading, but even the concept of an "ideal" receiver is detrimental in the theoretical consideration of art, since all it posits is the existence and nature of man as such. Art, in the same way, posits man's physical and spiritual existence, but in none of its works is it concerned with his attentiveness. No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the audience.

 * Besteht das Original nicht um dessentwillen, wie ließe sich dann die Übersetzung aus dieser Beziehung verstehen?
 * If the original does not exist for the reader's sake, how could the translation be understood on the basis of this premise?

 * So dürfte von einem unvergeßlichen Leben oder Augenblick gesprochen werden, auch wenn alle Menschen sie vergessen hätten. Wenn nämlich deren Wesen es forderte, nicht vergessen zu werden, so würde jenes Prädikat nichts Falsches, sondern nur eine Forderung, der Menschen nicht entsprechen, und zugleich auch wohl den Verweis auf einen Bereich enthalten, in dem ihr entsprochen wäre: auf ein Gedenken Gottes.
 * One might, for example, speak of an unforgettable life or moment even if all men had forgotten it. If the nature of such a life or moment required that it be unforgotten, that predicate would imply not a falsehood but merely a claim unfulfilled by men, and probably also a reference to a realm in which it is fulfilled: God's remembrance.

 * Alle zweckmäßigen Lebenserscheinungen wie ihre Zweckmäßigkeit überhaupt sind letzten Endes zweckmäßig nicht für das Leben, sondern für den Ausdruck seines Wesens, für die Darstellung seiner Bedeutung.
 * All purposeful manifestations of life, including their very purposiveness, in the final analysis have their end not in life but in the expression of its nature, in the representation of its significance.

Capitalism as Religion (1921)

 * "Kapitalismus als Religion" in Gesammelte Schriften (1991), Bd. VI, S. 100 – 102

 * Im Kapitalismus ist eine Religion zu erblicken, d.h. der Kapitalismus dient essentiell der Befriedigung derselben Sorgen, Qualen, Unruhen, auf die ehemals die so genannten Religionen Antwort gaben.
 * A religion may be discerned in capitalism—that is to say, capitalism serves essentially to allay the same anxieties, torments, and disturbances to which the so-called religions offered answers.
 * Translated by Rodney Livingstone in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1 (Harvard: 1996)

 * Der Kapitalismus ist vermutlich der erste Fall eines nicht entsühnenden, sondern verschuldenden Kultus. ... Ein ungeheures Schuldbewußtsein das sich nicht zu entsühnen weiß, greift zum Kultus, um in ihm diese Schuld nicht zu sühnen, sondern universal zu machen, dem Bewußtsein sie einzuhämmern und endlich und vor allem den Gott selbst in diese Schuld einzubegreifen.
 * Capitalism is presumably the first case of a blaming, rather than a repenting cult. ... An enormous feeling of guilt not itself knowing how to repent, grasps at the cult, not in order to repent for this guilt, but to make it universal, to hammer it into consciousness and finally and above all to include God himself in this guilt.
 * Translated by Chad Kautzer in The Frankfurt School on Religion: Key Writings by the Major Thinkers (2005), p. 259

Goethe's Elective Affinities (1924)

 * first published in Neue Deutsche Beitraege (1924), as translated by S. Corngold in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 1 (1996)

 * Where the presence of truth should be possible, it can be possible solely under the condition of the recognition of myth—that is, the recognition of its crushing indifference to truth.
 * p. 326

Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels [Origin of the German Mourning Play] (1925)

 * Treatises may be didactic in tone, but essentially they lack the conclusiveness of an instruction which could be asserted, like doctrine, by virtue of its own authority. ... Tirelessly the process of thinking makes new beginnings, returning in a roundabout way to its original object. This continual pausing for breath is the mode most proper to the process of contemplation. For by pursuing different levels of meaning in its examination of one single object it receives both the incentive to begin again and the justification for its irregular rhythm.
 * p. 28
 * Criticism and prophecy must be the two categories that meet in the salvation of the past
 * p. 53-54 (trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1977)

Main features of my first impression of hashish (1927)

 * Hauptzüge der ersten Haschisch-Impression, December 18, 1927, 3:30 AM

 * Mir schien: Ausgesprochene Unlust, mich über Dinge des praktischen Lebens, Zukunft, Daten, Politik zu unterhalten. Man ist an die intellektuelle Sphäre gebannt wie manchmal Besessene auf die sexuelle, ist von ihr angesaugt.
 * For me, it was like this: pronounced antipathy to conversing about matters of practical life, the future, dates, politics. You are fixated on the intellectual sphere as a man possessed may be fixated on the sexual: under its spell, sucked into it.
 * "Main features of my first impression of hashish" (18 December 1927), On Hashish (2006), p. 21

 * Man geht immer die gleichen Wege des Denkens wie vorher. Nur scheinen sie mit Rosen bestreut.
 * You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses.
 * "Main features of my first impression of hashish" (18 December 1927), On Hashish (2006), p. 22

One Way Street (1928)
as translated by E. Jephcott, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 1 (1996)
 * A curious paradox: people have only the narrowest private interest in mind when they act, yet they are at the same time more than ever determined in their behavior by the instincts of the mass. ... The diversity of individual goals is immaterial in face of the identity of the determining forces.
 * p. 451

"The Storyteller" (1936)
Published in Illuminations (1968)

 * The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.

 * If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.
 * p. 91

(1940)

 * Written in 1940; first published in German (1950), in English (1955) · Unless otherwise noted, most quotes in this section use the translation by Harry Zohn, published in Illuminations (1973) edited by Hannah Arendt · Dennis Redmond translation online (2001)

 * Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.
 * II

 * There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply.
 * II

 * Nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past — which is to say, only a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments. Each moment it has lived becomes a citation à l'ordre du jour — and that day is Judgement Day.
 * III

 * The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.
 * V

 * The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.
 * V

 * To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.
 * Variant translation:
 * To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize “how it really was.” It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger. For historical materialism it is a question of holding fast to a picture of the past, just as if it had unexpectedly thrust itself, in a moment of danger, on the historical subject. The danger threatens the stock of tradition as much as its recipients. For both it is one and the same: handing itself over as the tool of the ruling classes. In every epoch, the attempt must be made to deliver tradition anew from the conformism which is on the point of overwhelming it. For the Messiah arrives not merely as the Redeemer; he also arrives as the vanquisher of the Anti-christ. The only writer of history with the gift of setting alight the sparks of hope in the past, is the one who is convinced of this: that not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.
 * As translated by Dennis Redmond (2001)

 * Es ist niemals ein Dokument der Kultur, ohne zugleich ein solches der Barbarei zu sein.
 * There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
 * VII

 * The nature of this melancholy becomes clearer, once one asks the question, with whom does the historical writer of historicism actually empathize. The answer is irrefutably with the victor. Those who currently rule are however the heirs of all those who have ever been victorious. Empathy with the victors thus comes to benefit the current rulers every time.
 * VII, often misquoted as "History is written by the victors"

 * The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the "state of emergency" in which we live is not the exception but the rule.
 * VIII

 * A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
 * IX

 * The historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore called "Once upon a time" in historicism's bordello.
 * XVI

 * Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.
 * XVII

 * The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
 * XVII

 * The present, which, as a model of Messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment, coincides with the stature which the history of mankind has in the universe.
 * XVIII

 * We know that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. The Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance, however. This stripped the future of its magic, to which all those succumb who turn to the soothsayers for enlightenment. This did not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous empty time. For every second of time was the straight gate through which the Messiah might enter.
 * Note B

Arcades Project (1927-1940)

 * Ed. Roy Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Harvard University: Harvard UP, 1999)

 * Only a thoughtless observer can deny that correspondences come into play between the world of modern technology and the archaic symbol-world of mythology.

 * History breaks down in images not into stories.

 * In the fields with which we are concerned knowledge exists only in lightning flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterwards.

Quotes about Benjamin

 * Walter Benjamin, who observes that stories transform the storyteller as well as the listeners.
 * Kathleen Alcalá Interview (2021)

 * Postmodernism, like Walter Benjamin's 'mechanical reproduction', seeks to dismantle the intimidating aura of high-modernist culture with a more demotic, user-friendly art, suspecting all hierarchies of value as privileged and elitist. There is no better or worse, just different.
 * Terry Eagleton (1983, 1996), Literary Theory: An Introduction, second edition, University of Minnesota Press, ISBN 0-8166-1251-X, p 202

 * [Benjamin] must surely be among the 20th century's most overrated writers. Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Karl Kraus—Benjamin could render the juiciest of subjects arid.
 * Joseph Epstein (2011). "A Very Public Intellectual", The Wall Street Journal (2 April 2011)

 * [A]n enormous Anglo-American industry of post-structuralist and postmodernist interpretation has grown up around the translations we have, distorting Benjamin’s real concerns. Apart from specialists familiar with the German background to his work, English-speaking readers are probably no closer to understanding Benjamin’s writings than they were when Hannah Arendt first introduced him in America over twenty-five years ago.
 * Mark Lilla, "The Riddle of Walter Benjamin", The New York Review of Books (25 May 1995)

title: Walter Benjamin


text:
Gallagher

Gallagher (born Leo Anthony Gallagher; July 24, 1946 – November 11, 2022) was an American comedian and prop comic, most popularly known for smashing watermelons as part of his act.

Quotes

 * If "pro" is the opposite of "con", is "progress" the opposite of "congress"?
 * From the 1985 movie The Bookkeeper.
 * Now smoking would be okey if when you sucked it in, you kept it in.
 * Mad as hell 1981
 * I don't want you get an idea I experiment with drugs, cause I don't. I am into full-scale research.

title: Gallagher