p6 - Fear of authority figures?

p7 - you consider everyone powerful. Me too, perhaps? … I probably have no less respect for those with power than you do, only I’m not as honest as you and don’t always care to admit it.

p9 - There is no different between the peasants and the Castle

p19 - K. is an authority figure

p24 - It was only as a village worker, as far from the Castle gentlemen as possible, that he could achieve anything at the Castle

p28 - Is there really a Castle? A king?

p37 - everyone trying to prove they are important.

p38 - does this mean that such a person has reached the ultimate goal? … But the world puts up great resistance, the higher the goals, the greater the resistance…

p39 - K. seems to just be using all of these people to get to the Castle

  • Everyone is trying to achieve this “ultimate goal” of reaching the Castle
  • But the peasants just live. They aren’t worried about the Castle

p41 - K. constantly felt he was lost or had wandered further into foreign lands than any human being before him, so foreign that even the air hadn’t a single component of the air of his homeland…

p49 - doesn’t mean that I could bear the sight of Klamm if there weren’t a door separating us…

p51 - childlike persistance, questioning “why?”

p55 - the advantage here is that those who are ignorant take greater risks…

p56 - those who are ignorant naturally consider everything possible

p58 - Nowehere else had K. ever seen one’s official position and one’s life so intertwined as they were here, so intertwined that it sometimes seems as though office and life had switched places.

p72 - official statements are meaningless

p73 - navigating the official hierarchy is to play the game

p89 - ignominious machinations of officialdom

p93 - women do anything to support their spouse’s dream

p106 - the only one who had held his ground, but it was a victory that gave no joy.

p114 - slivers of hope

p126 - don’t take life or your goals so serious that you can’t laugh at the absurdities of life

p140 - perhaps the weakness that came over the two of us simply comes from our not having had breakfast yet. :)

p147 - K. finally helping someone other than himself

p149 - Hans wants to be a man like K.

p152 - All this wasn’t too painful, it was part of the series of life’s endless little sufferings…

p153 - he had not come here in order to lead a life in honor and peace

p154 - “childishly open”

p155 - it’s only since getting to know me that you have become conscious of your goal. That was because you believed that in me you had conquered a mistress of Klamm’s and thus had a pawn that could be redeemed only at the highest price.

p155 - the only value I have in your eyes is that I was Klamm’s mistress, in your ignorance you try to ensure that I do not forget Klamm, so that in the end I don’t put up too much resistence when the decisive moment arrives, but you also fight with the landlady, the only person you think capable of tearing me from you…

p156 - And then, the landlady said in conclusion, if you see that you’ve been wrong about everything, about your assumptions, your hopes, your notion of Klamm and of his relations with me, then my true hell will begin, then, even more than before, I shall be your only possession, on which you are dependent, but at the same time a possession that has proved to be worthless and that you’ll treat accordingly, since the only feeling you have for me is as proprietor.

p158 - thoughts as a weapon

p164 - the castle won’t make you happy

  • Schwarzer, on the other hand, constantly made for her the sacrifice of remaining in the village; the messengers from his father who often came to pick him up he dismissed with great anger, as if such brief reminders of the Castle and of his duty as a son were seriously, irreparably compromising his happiness.

p172 - “Castle work”

  • that job you hate, but it’s respected by everyone

p174 - He enters offices, but those are only a portion of the total, then there are barriers and behind them still more offices.

  • Always more barriers; another Castle

p175 - why cross the barriers at all?

p180 - it’s not rewarding work. They need to find value outside of work.

  • estimate what he has accomplished and decide in the end that it’s very little…so he picks up his shoemaker’s work
  • enjoys shoemaking over castle worker - “only the shoemaker’s iron tempts you…”

p180 - What is it you really want Barnabas? What sort of career, what sort of goal is it you dream of?

p183 - companies like them young and easy to influence and control

p183 - if an authority is good, then why shouldn’t one respect it?

p183 - … every word as though it were a word from Revelations and make one’s own happiness in life depend on the interpretation.

p184 - … encouraging him now means telling him that he’s right, that he need only carry on in the same way as before, but that way he’ll never accomplish anything; no matter how much you keep encouraging someone who is blindfolded to stare through the cloth, he still won’t see a thing; it’s only when you take off the blindfold that he can see.

p184 - he would be too greatly honored if he doesn’t spend the rest of his life lost in a dark corner of the office.

p184 - … we do not lack respect for the authorities… But it’s misguided respect… it’s respect that is addressed to teh wrong place, that kind of respect that demeans its object.

p192 - Sortini was obviously annoyed that the sight of Amalia had moved him and kept him from his work.

p193 - the curse was placed on our family…

p194 - her not going was heroic

p196 - When a man so unfamiliar with the ways of the world as Sortini is overcome by love for a village girl, this naturally takes on a very different shape from the love affair of the cabinet-maker’s apprentice next door. Nor should on forget the great distance between an official and a shoemaker’s daughter…

p196 - they say that all of us belong to the Castle

p196 - the relationship between women and officials is very difficult

p202 - our best friends were quickest to leave

p204 - mindless timidity of the people, their delight in someone else’s plight, their fickleness in friendship

p205 - it was all due to the influence of the Castle

p205 - I once heard of a young man whose mind was taken up day and night with thoughts of the Castle

p207 - The villagers even expected that we would come back, that Father would reopen his workshop… all of the villagers regretted what they had done; when a respected family in the village is suddenly cut off completely, that is to everyone’s disadvantage… they thought they were only doing their duty, and in their place we would have behaved no differently.

p209 - this was all quite natural and unavoidable, but not good, and indeed we kept getting more and more mired in the very thing we wanted to escape from.

p210 - she also had the sense to see through it, we saw only the consequences, she saw the cause… she stood face to face with the truth

p213 - everything he had lost here, he would easily make up for again, all this would be beside the point if they would only forgive him. But what should he be forgiven, they said, no complaint had been filed…

p215 - willing to sacrifice everything for something that means nothing. Maybe not even “something”

p219 - she was just there for them. That’s all she ever needed too, but her parents gave their lives for something she never wanted.

p222 - the servants are the true masters as the Castle; they certainly do know how to appreciate that and while at the Castle, where they must move about under its laws, they are calm and dignified, I have heard various reports confirming this, and even among the servants here you find traces of it, but only traces, because in the village the laws of the Castle are no longer entirely applicable to them, they seem transformed, having turned into a wild, unruly horde, governed not by the laws but by their insatiable drives.

p223 - K. didn’t have a strong enough desire to get to the Castle, Olga figured it out

p227 - This success almost made me go mad

p228 - It is especially difficult to understand why up there, as a man, he has so completely lost the courage which, when he was a boy, was enough to drive us to despair.

p254 - one ends up sacrificing one’s health for things that are truly not worth it.

p261 - you shouldn’t let those disappointments frighten you off. Here some things seem to be arranged in such a way as to frighten people off, and when one is new to the place those obstacles seem absolutely impenetrable.

p261 - opportunities through which more can be achieved with a word, with a glance, with a sign of trust, than with a lifetime of grueling effort.

p265 - in your dreams you are free to do and be whatever you want

p269 - How suicidal happiness can be!

p273 - they want robots not free souls that challenge them

p275 - finding peace in the craziness of following one’s dreams

  • He felt almost comfortable amid the bustle

p278 - battle against these stubborn little rooms

  • reminds me of Monsters Inc. movie from childhood

p281 - beat K., but at what?

p284 - K. has power over them through his actions they’re weak.

p291 - love or work.

  • What is he striving for, what are the important things that make him so preoccupied and make him forget what is nearest and best and most beautiful?

p303 - It even looked as if it was only through his contact with Frieda that he had discovered his actual insignificance…

p307 - You chambermaids are used to spying through a keyhole, and so from the tiny details that you actually see you often draw grand but false conclusions…

p309 - the effect of female beauty

p310 - ensure that our tongues don’t get spoiled

p310 - what should I climb any higher than they; that’s precisely what kept us together…

p311 - they know the life that they’re leading there is miserable but they’ve already reconciled themselves to it, … their tears over my departure were mostly out of grief that I had to leave the room we share and go out into the cold — there, everything outside the room seems cold…