Committing suicide would be so irrational that even had he wished to, the irrationality of the act would have prevented him.

“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

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

“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.”

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.”

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.

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

“No,” said the priest, “you don’t have to consider everything true, you just have to consider it necessary.” “A depressing opinion,” said K. “Lies are made into a universal system.”

I’m always involved in my work, and so I have my wits about me; it would be a positive pleasure to confront a situation like this at my office.