"I feel like brushing the hair off your forehead, and consulting your eyes."

"I shall drink hot lemonade, wrap a hot towel around me, withdraw from the world, and dream about you."

"In a way, you are poetry material; You are full of cloudy subtleties I am willing to spend a lifetime figuring out. Words burst in your essence and you carry their dust in the pores of your ethereal individuality."

"The moonlight lay everywhere with the natural peace that is granted to no other light."

"I am empty and futile in every corner of my being, even in my unhappiness."

"I need solitude for my writing; not 'like a hermit' - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man."

"I mustn't look at you too much, or I won't be able to take my eyes off you at all."

"Since I met you, I've felt abandoned without your nearness; your nearness is all I ever dream of, the only thing."

“Writing is a deeper sleep than death. Just as one wouldn't pull a corpse from its grave, I can't be dragged from my desk at night.”

"Should I be grateful or should I curse the fact that despite all misfortune I can still feel love..."

"the poisonous world flows into my mouth like water into that of a drowning man."

"Peaceful moon. I consist only of bones."

Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923

"You are so vulnerably haunting; Your eeriness is terrifyingly irresistible."

"Always only the desire to die and the not-yet-yielding; this alone is love."

"I long for you; I who usually longs without longing, as though I am unconscious and absorbed in neutrality and apathy, really, utterly long for every bit of you."

"There are times when my longing for you overwhelms me […] so often I can think of you only with teeth clenched."

"What an effort to keep alive! Erecting a monument does not require an expenditure of so much strength."

"There sat I, a faded being, under faded leaves."

"Life is merely terrible; I feel it as few others do. Often — and in my inmost self perhaps all the time — I doubt whether I am a human being."