Quotes from Olga Tokarczuk

What is the point of a law that applies only to some? The law should be observed for everyone without exception, wherever our ships and our money are able to take us.

I know the date of my own death, and that lets me feel free.

It takes the Police a long time to establish things that seem obvious.

I have nowhere to return to. It's like a state of imprisonment. The walls of the cell are the horizon of what I can see. Beyond them exists a world that's alien to me and doesn't belong to me. So for people like me the only thing possible is here and now, for every future is doubtful, everything yet to come is barely sketched and uncertain, like a mirage that can be destroyed by the slightest twitch of the air.

It's not about whether God exists or not. It's not like that. To believe, or not to believe, that is the question.

What do you expect us to do?" "Set the wheels in motion. Punish the culprits. Change the law." "That's too much. You can't want all those things," he said. "Oh yes I can! And I'm the one to define what I can want," I shouted furiously

It's just like what they say about lightening; It's safest to stand where it has already struck.

A Peloponnesian strait is what the earth gives to the water, and Crete what the water gives to the earth.

Perhaps that's the whole point of prayer—to think to yourself in peace, to want nothing, to ask for nothing, but simply to sort out your own mind. That should be enough.

Low, dark clouds had been scudding across the sky all day, and now, late in the evening, they were rubbing their wet bellies against the hills.

Infants and old people look the same.

We have done nothing other than waking up at midnight, at the time of the greatest darkness, in our low, dark, cubbyholes, in the cold, to study light. It is the light that has revealed to us that the huge body of matter and its laws is not mechut, or real, and also all its shapes and manifestations, its infinite forms, its laws and habits. The truth of the world is not matter, but the vibration of the sparks of light, that constant flickering that is located in every last thing.

death renders all faces similar.

The clouds were so low that one could hook onto them and let oneself be carried away to a distant land, to the south, to warmer climes. There one could jump down straight into the olive groves, or at least the vineyards in Moravia, where delicious green wine is made.

In a way, people like her, those who wield a pen, can be dangerous. At once a suspicion of fakery springs to mind – that such a Person is not him or herself, but an eye that's constantly watching, and whatever it sees it changes into sentences; in the process it strips reality of its most essential quality – its inexpressibility.

Testosterone Autism: The person beset by this ailment....develops an interest in various tools and machinery, and he's drawn to the Second World War and the biographies of famous people, mainly politicians and villains.

Tak wi?c mam przed oczami ci?gle ten obraz, jak w czasie rosyjskiego obl??enia, gdy wali?y dzia?a i kruszy?y si? mury twierdzy, gdy trz?s?a si? ostrzeliwana ziemia i ludzie padali jak muchy, Pan w izbie oficerskiej przy wie?y swojego wi?zienia ssa? kobiec? pier? i naprawia? w ten sposób dziurawy, n?dzny ?wiat.

These people make one feel as if a stronger memory of our former innocence remains in them, as if they were a freak of nature, not entirely battered by the Fall. Perhaps they are messengers, like the servants who find a lost prince who's unaware of his origins, show him the robe that he

La morte implica la privazione del diritto al movimento, perché la vita è movimento. Il corpo ucciso smette di muoversi. L'uomo è un corpo.

I stopped in the sloping market square, and gradually I felt flooded by a powerful sense of communion with the people passing by. Each man was my brother and each woman my sister. We were so very much alike. So fragile, impermanent, and easily destroyed. We trustingly went to and fro beneath the sky, which had nothing good in store for us.

Many times Annushka had tried to barter with anyone she could, with God, with the Virgin, with Saint Parascheva, with the whole iconostasis, even with the closer, vaguer realm of fate.

I realized that—in spite of all the risks involved—a thing in motion will always be better than a thing at rest; that change will always be a nobler thing than permanence; that that which is static will degenerate and decay, turn to ash, while that which is in motion is able to last for all eternity.

?wiat si? sko?czy?, cho? zatrzyma? pozory trwania. Tak wygl?da prawdziwy koniec.

You know what, sometimes it seems to me we're living in a world that we fabricate for ourselves. We decide what's good and what isn't, we draw maps of meanings for ourselves . . . And then we spend our whole lives struggling with what we have invented for ourselves. The problem is that each of us has our own version of it, so people find it hard to understand each other." There was some truth in