#czechwriters

[eikthyrnirrose]

[fuckyeahfranzkafka]

“This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me.”    -Franz Kafka (1883-1924)

[fuckyeahfranzkafka]

Franz Kafka with his favorite sister, Ottla. On this day in 1883, Kafka was born in Prague, Czech Republic. Happy birthday, Franz!!!!!

[fuckyeahfranzkafka]

“What I feel towards mice is naked fear. To explore the origin of that is up to psychoanalysts... Like the vermin-phobia, it's certainly related to the unexpected, unwanted, unavoidable, sort of mute, grim, secret-purposeful appearance of these animals, with the feeling that they have dug hundreds of tunnels through the walls around me and are lurking there...The idea for example of an animal that would look exactly like a pig, i.e. in itself comical, but would be as small as a rat and come snorting out of a hole in the floor is a horrific idea.“ -Kafka describes his fear of mice in a letter to Max Brod, December 1917

[fuckyeahfranzkafka]

Franz Kafka, unknown photographer. “This photo was taken in 1906 and was said to have hung over his mother’s bed.  Kafka was well known for sending his own portraits to his various flames. To Kafka it was a form of self-sacrifice by giving up his likeness to the perception of others.”                                                                  

[fuckyeahfranzkafka]

All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else.

Franz Kafka

[fuckyeahfranzkafka]

"I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones."

Kafka in a letter to Milena Jesenska

[fuckyeahfranzkafka]

In 1912, the twenty-nine-year-old Franz Kafka, a lifelong resident of Prague whose occasional travels had taken him no farther than Paris, decided to write a novel set in America."

E.L. Doctorow’s foreword to Kafka’s Amerika