...seizing and incorporating...There is nothing about us which is more strongly primitive. [p. 203] - Elias Canetti

A mind, lean in its own language. In others, it gets fat.

It is not, however, only the word, it is also the thing, in all its infinite complexity, that he [Kafka] articulates with unrivaled courage and clarity. For, since he fears power in any form, since the real aim of his life is to withdraw from it, in whatever form it may appear, he detects it, identifies it, names it, and creates figures of it in every instance where others would accept it as being nothing out of the ordinary.

“He is a lesser figure than X”—how it pleases an Englishman to say that! Never suspecting what basement that would put him in, a wood louse.