The Trial: A New Translation Based on the Restored Text (The Schocken Kafka Library)

Above all, if he wanted to get anywhere, he had to reject the notion of any possible guilt right from the start.

“Your question, Your Honor, about my being a house painter—and you weren’t really asking at all, you were telling me outright—is characteristic of the way these entire proceedings against me are being conducted. You may object that these aren’t proceedings at all, and you’re certainly right there, they are only proceedings if I recognize them as su

Then he went up the first set of stairs after all, his mind playing with the memory of the remark the guard Willem had made that the court was attracted by guilt, from which it actually followed that the room for the inquiry would have to be located off whatever stairway K. chanced to choose.

Because I don’t even consider them guilty; it’s the organization that’s guilty, it’s the high officials who are guilty.”

the old legal maxim: a suspect is better off moving than at rest, for one at rest may be on the scales without knowing it, being weighed with all his sins.”

“I find it odd,” said Fräulein Bürstner, “to be forced to forbid you to do something your own conscience should forbid, namely, to enter my room when I’m away.”

One needn’t be particularly faint of heart to be easily persuaded of the impossibility of ever finishing the petition. Not because of laziness or deceit, the only things that kept the lawyer from finishing, but because without knowing the nature of the charge and all its possible ramifications, his entire life, down to the smallest actions and even

But he saw at once that this would be a gross overreaction and even suspected himself of wishing to change lodgings because of the morning’s events. Nothing would be more irrational, and above all more pointless and contemptible.

You’re under arrest all right, but not the way a thief would be. If you’re arrested like a thief, that’s bad, but this arrest—. It seems like something scholarly, I’m sorry if that sounds stupid, but it seems like something scholarly that I don’t understand, but that I don’t need to understand either.”