A Hunger Artist (Franz Kafka)

Quotes from A Hunger Artist by Franz Kafka:

• Experience had proven that for about forty days, through gradually intensified publicity, you could go on stimulating a city’s interest, but beyond that time there was no audience.
• Try to explain the art of starving to someone! Those who have no feel for it can never be made to understand.
• And so he lived […] in apparent glory, honored by the world, but for all that usually in a melancholy mood, which grew increasingly so because no one was able to take it seriously.
• No one, not even the starvation artist himself knew how great his achievement really was, and his heart grew heavy.
• Only he could also be the perfectly assured spectator of his fast.
• Back then the hunger artist captured the attention of the entire city.
• No one could know [...] whether this was a case of truly continuous, flawless fasting.
• It was impossible to fight against this lack of understanding.
• This perversion of the truth, familiar to the artist though it was, always unnerved him afresh and proved too much for him. What was a consequence of the premature ending of his fast was here presented as the cause of it! To fight against this lack of understanding, against a whole world of nonunderstanding, was impossible.