Kafka’s Most Unsettling Lines, and Where They Come From

The most unsettling Kafka quotes are the calm ones. A man wakes up as a giant bug and worries about his job; another is arrested one morning and his guards eat his breakfast; a court, a guard explains, is drawn out by guilt rather than sent looking for it. Below are fourteen of Kafka’s strangest lines from Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis) and Der Prozess (The Trial), each quoted in Kafka’s original German with its section or chapter and the scene around it.

A note on the English: every translation below is our own, made for this page from the German texts on Project Gutenberg. They stay close to Kafka’s word order, so you can see what he actually wrote.

Kafka quotes from The Metamorphosis

1. The opening

Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheueren Ungeziefer verwandelt.

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Franz Kafka, Die Verwandlung, section I

In English: When Gregor Samsa woke one morning from restless dreams, he found himself changed, there in his bed, into an enormous piece of vermin.

The impossible is stated as if it were the weather. There is no explanation and no cause, ever. The key word, Ungeziefer, is vaguer than “insect”: it means vermin or pests in general, and Kafka never pins it down.

2. It was no dream

»Was ist mit mir geschehen?« dachte er. Es war kein Traum.

Franz Kafka, Die Verwandlung, section I

In English: “What has become of me?” he thought. This was no dream.

Kafka gives him one question, then has him look across the room at the cloth samples unpacked on the table, because Samsa is a travelling salesman and it is a working day.

3. What a strenuous job

»Ach Gott,« dachte er, »was für einen anstrengenden Beruf habe ich gewählt! Tag aus, Tag ein auf der Reise.

Franz Kafka, Die Verwandlung, section I

In English: “Oh God,” he thought, “what an exhausting line of work I have picked! On the road, day after day.”

This is the joke that makes the story bearable and then unbearable. Gregor has become vermin, and his first real complaint is about his job: business worries, the plague of travel.

4. The apples

Diese kleinen roten Äpfel rollten wie elektrisiert auf dem Boden herum und stießen aneinander.

Franz Kafka, Die Verwandlung, section II

In English: These small red apples rolled around the floor as if electrified and knocked into one another.

Gregor’s father has filled his pockets from the fruit bowl on the sideboard and decided, in Kafka’s word, to bombardieren his son. One apple lodges in Gregor’s back and is still there, rotted, on the night he dies.

5. The old dung beetle

Anfangs rief sie ihn auch zu sich herbei, mit Worten, die sie wahrscheinlich für freundlich hielt, wie »Komm mal herüber, alter Mistkäfer!« oder »Seht mal den alten Mistkäfer!«

Franz Kafka, Die Verwandlung, section III

In English: At first she would also call him over, with words she probably thought were friendly, like “Come over here, you old dung beetle!” or “Look at the old dung beetle!”

The family has taken on a cleaning woman, and when Gregor once turns on her, she does not flinch; she raises a chair to bring down on his back. Her nickname is the closest the story comes to naming the creature, and it comes from someone who thinks she is being kind.

6. Was he an animal?

War er ein Tier, da ihn Musik so ergriff? Ihm war, als zeige sich ihm der Weg zu der ersehnten unbekannten Nahrung.

Franz Kafka, Die Verwandlung, section III

In English: Was he an animal, if music could move him like this? It felt to him as though the way were opening to the unknown food he had longed for.

His sister plays the violin for the family’s three lodgers, and Gregor creeps out to listen. It is the tenderest moment in the story and the one that ruins him: the lodgers see him and give notice on the spot, and the family’s patience ends that evening.

7. We must try to get rid of it

Ich will vor diesem Untier nicht den Namen meines Bruders aussprechen und sage daher bloß: wir müssen versuchen es loszuwerden.

Franz Kafka, Die Verwandlung, section III

In English: I won’t say my brother’s name in front of this monster, so all I’ll say is: we have to try to get rid of it.

The German is crueller than the usual paraphrase. Grete does not merely refuse to call the creature her brother; she refuses to speak his name in its presence, as if the name needed protecting. And the pronoun is es, it. Her father says Sie hat tausendmal recht, she is a thousand times right. Gregor, listening, agrees, and dies after the tower clock strikes three that morning.

8. Her young body

Und es war ihnen wie eine Bestätigung ihrer neuen Träume und guten Absichten, als am Ziele ihrer Fahrt die Tochter als erste sich erhob und ihren jungen Körper dehnte.

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Franz Kafka, Die Verwandlung, section III

In English: And it seemed to them like a confirmation of their new dreams and good intentions when, at the end of their ride, their daughter was the first to get up and stretch her young body.

The last sentence of the story. After Gregor’s death the family takes the tram out into the country, all three together for the first time in months, and talks over its prospects. Kafka ends on a second transformation, and it is the more chilling one.

Kafka quotes from The Trial

9. Someone must have slandered Josef K.

Jemand mußte Josef K. verleumdet haben, denn ohne daß er etwas Böses getan hätte, wurde er eines Morgens verhaftet.

Franz Kafka, Der Prozess, chapter 1 (first edition, Verlag Die Schmiede, 1925)

In English: Someone must have slandered Josef K., for without his having done anything bad, he was arrested one morning.

As with Gregor, the catastrophe arrives in the first sentence and is then met with routine. Notice denn, “for”: the narrator offers slander as a logical inference from K.’s innocence, which is exactly the kind of reasoning the book will go on to torment. Meanwhile his landlady’s cook has not brought breakfast, and the guards turn out to be eating it.

10. Drawn by guilt

Unsere Behörde, soweit ich sie kenne, und ich kenne nur die niedrigsten Grade, sucht doch nicht etwa die Schuld in der Bevölkerung, sondern wird, wie es im Gesetz heißt, von der Schuld angezogen und muß uns Wächter ausschicken.

Franz Kafka, Der Prozess, chapter 1

In English: Our authority, as far as I know it, and I only know the lowest ranks, doesn’t go hunting for guilt among the public; as the law says, it is drawn by guilt, and then it has to send us guards out.

The guard explains the system with complete confidence and admits in the same breath that he knows only its bottom rung. The logic is airtight and circular. K. says he does not know this law, and is told Desto schlimmer für Sie: so much the worse for you.

11. The courtroom on the stairs

daß das Gericht von der Schuld angezogen werde, woraus eigentlich folgte, daß das Untersuchungszimmer an der Treppe liegen mußte, die K. zufällig wählte.

Franz Kafka, Der Prozess, chapter 2, “Erste Untersuchung”

In English: that the court was drawn by guilt, from which it really followed that the hearing room had to be on whichever staircase K. happened to choose.

Summoned to a hearing without a room number, K. applies the guard’s theory to finding his way. It is absurd, and it works.

12. The doorkeeper

Hier konnte niemand sonst Einlaß erhalten, denn dieser Eingang war nur für dich bestimmt. Ich gehe jetzt und schließe ihn.

Franz Kafka, Der Prozess, chapter 9, “Im Dom”

In English: No one else could be let in here, because this entrance was meant for you alone. I am going now to shut it.

A priest in the cathedral tells K. the parable of a man from the country who waits for years at a door into the law. Only at the end does the doorkeeper, shouting so the dying man can hear, say the door was his alone.

13. True or necessary

„man muß nicht alles für wahr halten, man muß es nur für notwendig halten.“ „Trübselige Meinung,“ sagte K. „Die Lüge wird zur Weltordnung gemacht.“

Franz Kafka, Der Prozess, chapter 9

In English: “You don’t have to hold everything to be true, you only have to hold it to be necessary.” “A dismal opinion,” said K. “Lying is made into the order of the world.”

This exchange is the nearest the novel comes to a thesis. Weltordnung is a grand word, the order of the world itself, and K. uses it in the only moment he names the system plainly. The narrator adds that he said it as if it were final, but it was not his last judgement; he was too tired to follow the story’s consequences.

14. Like a dog

„Wie ein Hund!“ sagte er, es war, als sollte die Scham ihn überleben.

Franz Kafka, Der Prozess, chapter 10, “Ende”

In English: “Like a dog!” he said; it was as if the shame was meant to outlive him.

On the evening before his thirty-first birthday, two gentlemen in frock coats and top hats walk K. to a quarry at the edge of town, and one of them drives a knife into his heart and turns it twice. The trial has taught him to feel guilty without ever learning the charge.

Quick reference

Why the flat sentences are the frightening ones

Read these together and the method is clear. Kafka never raises his voice. Gregor’s transformation and Josef K.’s execution are reported in the same even tone as train times and breakfast. The horror is not that the world is chaotic, but that it is orderly and still makes no sense.

For a gentler kind of strict nonsense, compare Alice in Wonderland’s oddest lines, where the logic jokes are played for laughs. Melville’s Bartleby, another clerk undone by a polite sentence, is in the strangest sentences in classic literature. And for solitude without the bureaucracy, see our book quotes about solitude.

One detail worth knowing before you reread Der Prozess: the Gutenberg text is the first edition, published in Berlin by Verlag Die Schmiede in 1925, and its title page spells the novel Der Prozess.

Sources

• Franz Kafka, Die Verwandlung, Project Gutenberg eBook #22367 (German): gutenberg.org/ebooks/22367
• Franz Kafka, Der Prozess: Roman (Berlin: Verlag Die Schmiede, 1925), Project Gutenberg eBook #69327 (German): gutenberg.org/ebooks/69327