Why are those who knew him, when they pass from the memory of a young man, sensitive and gay, to the work — novels and writings — surprised to pass into a nocturnal world, a world of cold torment, a world not without light but in which light blinds at the same time that it illuminates; gives hope, but makes hope the shadow of anguish and despair? Why is it that he who, in his work, passes from the objectivity of the narratives to the intimacy of the Diary, descends into a still darker night in which the cries of a lost man can be heard? Why does it seem that the closer one comes to his heart, the closer one comes to an unconsoled center from which a piercing flash sometimes bursts forth, an excess of pain, excess of joy? Who has the right to speak of Kafka without making this enigma heard, an enigma that speaks with the complexity, with the simplicity, of enigma? . Maurice Blanchot
About This Quote

Franz Kafka (1883 - 1924) was an Austrian-Jewish writer who is best known for his “Kafkaesque” work. This quote is quite true! Many of his works are written in the style of the mysterious, weird, fantastical, and creepy. The likeliness of this quote is that some people may believe that Kafka is a strange person yet others may believe that he was deeply sensitive and was driven to write about his troubles in some of these stories.

Source: Friendship

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  2. Reading is ignorant. It begins with what it reads and in this way discovers the force of a beginning. It is receiving and hearing, not the power to decipher and analyze, to go beyond by developing or to go back by laying bare; it does...
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  4. The central point of the work of art is the work as origin, the point which cannot be reached, yet the only one which is worth reaching.
  5. The authentic answer is always the question’s vitality. It can close in around the question, but it does so in order to preserve the question by keeping it open.
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