The Metamorphosis (Legend Classics)

Hardly aware of what he was doing other than a slight feeling of shame, he hurried under the couch.

Then, out of sheer delicacy, knowing that Gregor wouldn't be able to eat in front of her, she hurriedly left the room, even turning the key, just as a sign to Gregor that he could settle down and take his time over everything.

... his endeavours thus far had been a failure, that he should call a halt and come home - and thenceforth suffer himself to be stared at by everyone as a returnee - because it was only his friends who had known what to do with their lives, while he was an overgrown schoolboy, who would have done better to stick to what they, quite properly flourishing at home, now told him to do.

We're walking along without a care in the world, the wind is pushing through the gaps between us and our various limbs. Our throats feel free in the mountains! It's a miracle we haven't burst into song!

... when we find ourselves down on the street, with limbs that respond to the unexpected freedom they have come into with a particular suppleness, when by this one decision we feel all the decisiveness in us mobilized, when we recognize with uncommon clarity that we have more energy than we need to accomplish and to withstand the most abrupt changes, and when in this mood we walk down the longest streets – then for the duration of that evening we have escaped our family once and for all, so it drifts into vaporousness, whereas we ourselves, as indisputable and sharp and black as a silhouette, smacking the backs of our thighs, come into our true nature.

"Calm —indeed the calmest— reflection might be better than the most confused decisions"

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, if music could move him so?"

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

I am too depressed at the moment, and perhaps I shouldn't be writing at all. But my story's hero has also had a very bad time today, and yet it is only the last lap of his misfortune, which is now becoming permanent.

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

Sometimes he looks at me, as if to say: ‘I’ll go with you, father.’ And then I think to myself: ‘You’d be the last man I’d entrust myself to.’ And then his look seems to say: ‘Well, then at least I’ll be the last.’

My grandfather was in the habit of saying: 'Life is astonishingly brief. By now it is all so condensed in my memory that I can hardly understand, for instance, how a young man can undertake to ride to the neighbouring village without wondering whether - even if everything goes right-the span of a normal happy life will be enough for such a ride.’

As he listened to these words of his mother, Gregor understood that the want of any direct human address, in combination with his monotonous life at the heart of the family over the past couple of months, must have confused his understanding, because otherwise he would not have been able to account for the fact that he seriously wanted to have his room emptied out. Was it really his wish to have his cosy room, comfortable furnished with old heirlooms, transformed into a sort of cave, merely so that he would be able to crawl around in it freely, without hindrance in an direction — even at the expense of rapid and utterly forgetting his human past?

As nobody could understand him, nobody, not even his sister

It occurred to him how simple everything would be if somebody came to help him.

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

With a certain definitiveness he sensed, terrified, that everything was about to collapse all around him, and so he waited.

They had been good times and they had never come again, at least not with the same splendour