All I Am is Literature Kafka Quote Mug

Designed exclusively for the exhibition Franz Kafka, on view at the Morgan Library & Museum from November 22, 2024 through April 13, 2025, this mug makes a great keepsake for any literature lover.

This quote is from Franz Kafka's Diaries, written from the perspective of a young man with prospects to meet fiancée, Felice Bauer's, father for the first time. In response to an imagined and real interrogation by his intended's father, he declares by way of a letter: "All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else." His expression in this letter is a commitment to something other than a life to be lived and shared with Felice. Kafka's dairies repeatedly show that his life, his existence, was literature, and that existence was not shareable as a “lived experience”.