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1 " Brod was a brilliant intellectual with exceptional energy; a generous man willing to do battle for others; his attachment to Kafka was warm and disinterested. The only problem was his artistic orientation: a man of ideas, he knew nothing of the passion for form; his novels (he wrote twenty of them) are sadly conventional; and above all: he understood nothing at all about modern art.Why, despite all this, was Kafka so fond of him? What about you-do you stop being fond of your best friend because he has a compulsion to write bad verse? "
― Milan Kundera , Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts
2 " There were profound reasons for his attachment to the sea: he loved it because as a hardworking artist he needed rest, needed to escape from the demanding complexity of phenomena and lie hidden on the bosom of the simple and tremendous; because of a forbidden longing deep within him that ran quite contrary to his life's task and was for that very reason seductive, a longing for the unarticulated and immeasurable, for eternity, for nothingness. To rest in the arms of perfection is the desire of any man intent upon creating excellence; and is not nothingness a form of perfection? "
― Thomas Mann , Death in Venice and Other Tales
3 " Gotama's awakening involved a radical shift of perspective rather than the gaining of privileged knowledge into some higher truth. He did not use the words " know" and " truth" to describe it. He spoke only of waking up to a contingent ground--" this-conditionality, conditioned arising" --that until then had been obscured by his attachment to a fixed position. While such an awakening is bound to lead to a reconsideration of what one " knows," the awakening itself is not primarily a cognitive act. It is an existential readjustment, a seismic shift in the core of oneself and one's relation to others and the world. Rather than providing Gotama with a set of ready-made answers to life's big questions, it allowed him to respond to those questions from an entirely new perspective.To live on this shifting ground, one first needs to stop obsessing about what has happened before and what might happen later. One needs to be more vitally conscious of what is happening now. This is not to deny the reality of past and future. It is about embarking on a new relationship with the impermanence and temporality of life. Instead of hankering after the past and speculating about the future, one sees the present as the fruit of what has been and the germ of what will be. Gotama did not encourage withdrawal to a timeless, mystical now, but an unflinching encounter with the contingent world as it unravels moment to moment. "
4 " An all-powerful and sovereign Creator, who wants to have an intimate relationship with His creation, loves mankind beyond measure. God did not create the human race out of boredom or on a whim. No, He made us for His good pleasure and great delight. His attachment to us is so great that He longs for our fellowship and will one day live among us in paradise. He enjoys our company! Although we are corrupt and sinful in nature, He refuses to abandon that which His breath made alive. We are His. We belong to a King! He made a commitment to us…. we are His beloveds. In Him alone we find all hope. "
― Cheryl Zelenka
