Quotes from Olga Tokarczuk

She goes, for example, to Chistye Prudy, changes from Sokolnicheskaya to Kaluzhsko-Rizhskaya, and goes to Medvedkovo and then back to the other side of the city.

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.

Devilish creatures are always recognized by their feet -- they stamp the earth with a different seal.

Keitin teetä. Mustaa teetä. Saakoon nainen tietää, mitä on Tee.

Every place has two characters— every place is double. What is sublime is also fallen. What is clement is at the same time base. In the deepest darkness lies the spark of the most powerful light, and vice versa: where omnipresent clarity reigns, a pit of darkness lurks inside the seed of light.

my belief that the human psyche evolved in order to defend us against seeing the truth. To prevent us from catching sight of the mechanism. The psyche is our defence system – it makes sure we'll never understand what's going on around us. Its main task is to filter information, even though the capabilities of our brains are enormous. For it would be impossible to carry the weight of this knowledge. Because every tiny particle of the world is made of suffering.

There are many roads to God, it isn't ours to judge.' 'Of course it's ours. There are roads, and there's the wilderness.

What a methodology! It is tacitly assumed that people don't know themselves, but that if you furnish them with questions that are bright enough, they'll be able to figure themselves all out. They pose themselves a question, and they give themselves an answer. And they'll inadvertently reveal to themselves that secret they know nothing of. And that other assumption, which is terribly dangerous—that we are constant, and that our reactions can be predicted.

That evening is the limit of the world, and I've just happened upon it, by accident, while playing, not in search of anything.

The people aren't in a hurry, and don't compete against each other all the time. They don't go chasing after pipe dreams. They're happy with who they are and what they have.

sometimes it seems to me we're living in a world 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.

Drogi Mieczys?awie (...) czy zgodzi si? pan ze mn?, ?e cz?owiek istnieje tylko w j?zyku? Wszystko poza j?zykiem jest zwierz?ce i niezró?nicowane. To j?zyk sprawia, ?e jeste?my tym, kim jeste?my.

Fryderyk Chopin had always said he wanted to be buried in his native land,

Ta [Jumal] on meie sees, aga meie oleme tema sees. Ta tegutseb pimesi, aga teab, mida teeb. Ta on nagu leib - igaüks saab kääru ja maitseb seda omal kombel, aga ükski leivakäär ei sisalda tervet leiba.

It's clear that the largest things are contained in the smallest. There can be no doubt about it. At this very moment, as I write, there's a planetary configuration on this table, the entire Cosmos, if you like: a thermometer, a coin, an aluminium spoon and a porcelain cup. A key, a mobile phone, a piece of paper and a pen. And one of my grey hairs, whose atoms preserve the memory of the origins of life, of the cosmic Catastrophe that gave the world its beginning.

Soon, excited by the smells of the mainland, with all their incredibly important tasks and obligations, they would disappear onto the little streets by the waterfront, ebbing away like the ninth wave that reaches furthest and soaks into the ground and never returns to sea.

He learned how to forget, and forgetting brought him relief.

Las personas -que también son en sí mismas un proceso- tienen miedo de todo lo inestable y mutable. Por eso, imaginaron algo que no existe -la inmutabilidad- y decretaron que todo lo eterno e inmutable es perfecto. Le atribueron la inmutabilidad a Dios. Y de esta forma perdieron la capacidad de comprenderlo

Newspapers rely on keeping us in a constant state of anxiety, on diverting our emotions away from the things that really matter to us. Why should I yield to their power and let them tell me what to think? I trot around the little house, treading

At the bridge the wind hits both of them like a kind of lady boxer.

HERE TODAY AND GONE TOMORROW. ?O USE TO MILK IS YOUR SORROW

Literatura pomaga nam rozpozna? si? w cudzych istnieniach".

The same fate awaits me too, and Oddball, and the Deer outside; one day we shall all be nothing more than corpses.

Father Chmielowski, you seem to care more about books than you do about people,