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One of these quotes was actually written by Franz Kafka in a letter to his long-distance lover, Milena Jesenskà, in 1920 — the other two are from the internet:

1.

You are the knife I turn inside myself; that is love. That, my dear, is love.

― Franz Kafka

2.

Dear Milena,

I wish the world were ending tomorrow. Then I could take the next train, arrive at your doorstep in Vienna, and say: “Come with me, Milena. We are going to love each other without scruples or fear or restraint. Because the world is ending tomorrow.” Perhaps we don’t love unreasonably because we think we have time, or have to reckon with time. But what if we don't have time? Or what if time, as we know it, is irrelevant? Ah, if only the world were ending tomorrow. We could help each other very much.

― Franz Kafka

3.

If a million loved you, I am one of them, and if one loved you, it was me, and if no one loved you then know that I am dead.

― Franz Kafka

The second and third appear nowhere in the text of Kafka’s Letters to Milena. Some hours of frustrated internet archaeology on my part failed to yield a definitive source for the two fabrications (and Tumblr is one of the more frustrating platforms to dig through) although both seem to have been circulating as early as 2019 on Tumblr and also Goodreads.

For the second quote, fake and about the train to Vienna, I have a crisp memory of lying at night in bed sleepless on TikTok, encountering a video that had a really well-done and moody series of train drawings going along with a male robot-generated voice reading the text. The genre of these videos feels closely allied to BookTok and Dark Academia, and the robotic voice saying deeply poetic things is part of the whole effect.

But I can’t find this post that moved me so much (a frequent sadness in my life - did I dream it?)

The third one, “if a million loved you,” I found on Twitter a little while back:

It is a reference to a pretty well-known copypasta about being delusionally in love with celebrities, originally about Cristiano Ronaldo the footballer:

If X has a million fans, then I’m one of them, if X has one fan, then I’m that one, if X has no fans, then I’m dead.

Fill in “X” with any celebrity you stan. Know Your Meme, as always, offers the facts. The text is a little different in the supposedly Kafka version, a little more literary — but just different enough that it isn’t a direct reference.

And the first quote, the real one? It’s from the second letter Franz wrote to Milena on September 14th, 1920. They were in the middle of a massive argument. She lived in Vienna, he lived in Prague, and so Milena’s sister Vlasta (also in Prague) was a go-between for them. Although we only have Franz’s side of the correspondence (and he is rather vague) it seems Franz suggested to Vlasta that Milena return home to Prague and convalesce from a respiratory illness, and he may have divulged that she was unhappy in her marriage in Vienna.

Franz’s ulterior motive here is obvious: he wanted her in Prague, with him, and not with her husband. Milena, who had run off against her family’s will to marry her husband, now worried her lover had gone behind her back to her tyrannical father. The argument was massive.

Franz’s first letter of the day bounces from anger ( Now (your) telegram arrived as well. Really? Really? And you’re no longer lashing out at me?”") to poetic musing (“Sometimes when one wakes up in the morning one thinks that truth is right next to the bed, like an open grave with a few wilted flowers, ready to receive.”)

Franz sends that first letter, then receives a new letter from Milena. In reply to that new letter, he writes the second one, which has the thing about love being a knife he twists inside of himself. People stressed out over letters in 1920 like they stress out over DMs today.

Posts about each of the fake quotes are almost always accompanied by people asking in vain for the page number in the book Letters to Milena (I’m using the Philip Boehm translation) which gets kind of hilarious:

You can also get this fake Kafka quote in canvas and typewriter font (typo included) for your bedroom wall for just 43 dollars:

Writing “deep quotes” in Kafka’s voice might be seen as a kind of fan fiction. After all, many people only know Kafka through quotes, and never go much deeper than these: There are so many books and so little time in life. I started The Trial and couldn’t finish it.

Engaging with quotes is not necessarily a shallow engagement, but it is a convenient one — and it is one which strips away some of the context, making what’s said more relatable and universal, less contingent.

Reading the full letters, you are mixed up in the specificity of Franz and Milena — their manipulative behavior towards each other, the political situation of Central Europe in 1920, Milena’s refusal to leave her chronically unfaithful husband, Franz’s refusal to confront what she terms his great “fear.” This makes it difficult to see the quotes as just poetic utterances — when Kafka says his love is a knife he twists in himself, isn’t that guilt-tripping her, knowing the context?

But when you read the quote alone, it’s a piece of poetry. It doesn’t feel like something written from one specific person in Prague to another person in Vienna in 1920, but like something written for anyone living anywhere, for all time. I think the robot-voice recitation of a lot of these quotes on TikTok has a similar intention in mind: it’s not anybody’s voice specifically, it’s just a voice that can be all voices.

Twitterified culture has elevated the status of the witty quip, the right take, the sentence that carries the arrow of truth — and often, that’s all we have the time or attention to know about people.

This is my favorite part (and it really is from the book). Kafka writes this letter in March of 1922, at least a year after their love affair ends, reflecting on their long-distance relationship:

Writing letters is actually an intercourse with ghosts and by no means just with the ghost of the addressee but also with one’s own ghost, which secretly evolves inside the letter one is writing or even in a whole series of letters, where one letter corroborates another and can refer to it as witness. How did people ever get the idea they could communicate with one another by letter! One can think about someone far away and one can hold on to someone nearby; everything else is beyond human power.

There are two major facts in the Franz/Milena ship. First, it’s impossible: she’s married, lives far away, he can’t handle intimacy, and there’s an age gap: she’s like 25 and he’s around 40 and dying of tuberculosis. Second, it’s all through letters: they only meet IRL twice, for a few days each time.

They each fall in love with the other’s writing rather than with the other person. They start corresponding because she wants to translate his books (written in German) into Czech. In the letters, he writes in German and she writes in Czech. They love both languages, and talk about the resonant beauty of particular words in each. Kafka throws all his dark and brooding rizz into beautiful prose for Milena. He continues:

Writing letters… means exposing oneself to the ghosts, who are greedily waiting precisely for that. Written kisses never arrive at their destination; the ghosts drink them up along the way. It is this ample nourishment which enables them to multiply so enormously. People sense this and struggle against it; in order to eliminate as much of the ghosts' power as possible and to attain a natural intercourse, a tranquility of soul, they have invented trains, cars, airplanes — but nothing helps anymore: these are evidently inventions devised at the moment of crashing. The opposing side is so much calmer and stronger; after the postal system, the ghosts invented the telegraph, the telephone, the wireless. They will not starve, but we will perish.

The ghosts, for Kafka, are the ideas of people rather than people themselves. The pen is in your hand, but ultimately you have no control over the person that ends up on the page — as anybody who has ever looked at what they posted on Tumblr at fourteen years old can tell you. Past selves, old narratives, answers on government forms — media are the weapons of the ghosts: through the letter, the telephone, and the telegraph we create images of ourselves and others which are not us, but feed on us and threaten to consume us.

Technologies like trains, cars, and airplanes, which try to bring our bodies more rapidly into proximity, can’t beat the ghosts who move at the speed of electricity. Kafka sees a world where we’re increasingly falling in love with words on paper or voices carried on a wire rather than with actual people with bodies and in context. He reads Milena’s words, but he wants to hear her voice, see her lips move.

It is more of a sideways step than a leap to say Tumblr, Substack, and TikTok are also ghost-inventions, that the internet is a big ghost-land.

The “deep quote” is also a ghost-thing. When you see it on Tumblr, it pulls the words out of context, and makes them universal. Posting even the authentic quote about you being “the knife I turn inside myself” kills the Franzness and Milenaness of it all: with just the quote, you don’t get the argument, the worries about her health and his, the very specific 1920 Pragueness. Instead, you get the ghosts: the general ideas, the roles each are playing, the “tragic love story” rather than the messy real-life situation. You get someone’s idea of Franz’s idea of himself, just like you do in the fake quotes.

The fake quotes, the fan fiction ones, are just as ghostly as the real one when posted online. They show how Kafka’s name, feelings, and vibe have detached from Kafka himself — how the ghost continues a century after he died.

In the end, Kafka says the ghosts “will not starve, but we will perish.” You could read this as meaning, “our words outlive us.” But I feel what he means is a little more ominous: the ghosts end up strangling us, both as individuals and as groups. Many more people have read Kafka quotes on the internet than knew Kafka as a person, or maybe even have read Kafka novels. The ghosts we make through using media take on a life of their own, becoming real in the form of systems that gather data, which is itself ghost-food.

This ghost-food, in recent years, has been used to feed and raise ChatGPT, which runs on massive data sets of human-generated text. Mayhaps when the robots turn on us, it will be the moment that the Kafk’s ghosts finally devour us.

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