I always wanted you to admire my fasting, but you shouldn't admire it, you should love of my fasting.The Hunger Artist - Franz Kafka
I couldn't find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I would not have made a spectacle of myself.The Hunger Artist - Franz Kafka
It was easy to be a fasting man, he said, but hard to be a circus man.The Hunger Artist - Franz Kafka
But he defaulted on this obliging offer, refused to come out, merely raised his right arm in a gesture of refusal and sank back into the straw, evidently intending to hold out in his cage till his last breath.The Hunger Artist - Franz Kafka
Yet he had been seen, that was enough to prove his existence.The Hunger Artist - Franz Kafka
No one could enter the interior of his cage, which was divided from the public able only by a narrow barrier, without the artist's immediately becoming desperately disturbed and beginning to shake.The Hunger Artist - Franz Kafka
And he had a small impediment in his speech, for he had spent his career in the cage without uttering one word even when most desperately hungry, which, in turn, caused his lips to become a little sluggish from disuse.The Hunger Artist - Franz Kafka
For nowhere else was he valued anymore, while here in the circus his fame had even steadily increased from year to year.The Hunger Artist - Franz Kafka
At last they were forced to admit that his performance could not be surpassed.The Hunger Artist - Franz Kafka
One might, for example, try to see in it the respect people pay to age; after all, one couldn't make fasting one's profession after twenty—an idea which certainly could not have been further from their minds.The Hunger Artist - Franz Kafka
Not from thirst—no one need imagine that—but clearly from an excess of joy at his appearance.The Hunger Artist - Franz Kafka