Quotes from Olga Tokarczuk

Nothing is innocent, and nothing is insignificant, it's all a big endless puzzle.

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?

Drawing is never reproducing - in order to see, you have to know how to look, and you have to know what you're looking at.

There are some people at whom one only has to glance for one's throat to tighten and one's eyes to fill with tears of emotion. 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 wore in his native country, and remind him how to return home.

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 the table, the entire Cosmos if you like: a thermometer, a coin, an aluminum spoon and a porcelain cup. A key, a cell phone, a piece of paper and a pen. And one of my gray hairs, whose atoms preserve the memory of the origins of life, of the cosmic Catastrophe that gave the world its beginning.

There is too much world, so it's better to concentrate on particulars, rather than the whole.

She's a loner, she doesn't care about being around people. So neither failure nor success concerns her.

I believe, unswervingly, agonizingly, that it is in freaks that Being breaks through to the surface and reveals its true nature.

Your memory creates postcard images, but it doesn't really comprehend the world at all. That's why a landscape is so affected by the mood of the person looking at it. In it a person sees his own inner, transitory moments. Wherever he looks, he sees nothing but himself.

The best place for this kind of training is Holland where people, convinced of their utter innocence, do not use curtains. After dusk the windows turn into little stages on which actors act out their evenings. Sequences of images bathed in yellow, warm light are the individual acts of the same production entitled 'Life'. Dutch painting. Moving lives.

O kraju ?wiadcz? jego Zwierz?ta. Stosunek do Zwierz?t. Je?eli ludzie zachowuj? si? bestialsko wobec Zwierz?t, nie pomo?e im ?adna demokracja ani w ogóle nic.

maybe in our bodies there's a whole world of mythology? Maybe there exists some sort of reflection of the great and the small, the human body joining within itself everything with everything - stories and heroes, gods and animals, the order of plants and the harmony of minerals?

Anger always leaves a large void behind it, into which a flood of sorrow pours instantly, and keeps on flowing like a great river, without beginning or end.

I find this division of people into three groups—skiers, allergy sufferers and drivers—very convincing. It is a good, straightforward typology. Skiers are hedonists. They are carried down the slopes. Whereas drivers prefer to take their fate in their hands, although their spines often suffer as a result; we all know life is hard. Whereas the allergy sufferers are always at war. I must surely be an allergy sufferer.

We have a view of the world, but Animals have a sense of the world, do you see?

perhaps solitude has stretched out his thoughts into long strands, and accustomed him to internal dialogues.

They weren't real travelers: they left in order to return. And they were relieved when they got back, with a sense of having fulfilled an obligation.

Wie pani, czasem mam wra?enie, ?e ?yjemy w ?wiecie, który sobie wymy?lamy. Ustalamy sobie, co jest dobre, a co nie, rysujemy mapy znacze?... A potem ca?e ?ycie zmagamy si? z tym, co?my sobie wykoncypowali. Problem polega na tym, ?e ka?dy ma swoj? wersj?, i dlatego tak trudno jest si? ludziom dogada?.

Nobody takes any notice of old women who wander around with their shopping bags.

to someone from nowhere, every movement turns into a return

Postcards of landscapes, panoramas of old ruins, postcards ambitiously prepared so as to show as much as possible on that flat space, are slowly being replaced by photographs focusing on details. This is no doubt a good idea, because they relieve tired minds. There is too much world, so it's better to concentrate on particulars, rather than the whole.

Someday he would write his memoirs, when his adventures had arranged themselves into a suitably attractive package.

A man's free to do what he wants with his life, until he falls foul of the banks.

Obsession is, in any case, the premonition of the existence of an individual language, an irreproducible language through the attentive use of which we will be able to uncover the truth. We must follow this premonition into regions that to others might seem absurd and mad. I don't know why this language of truth sounds angelic to some, while to others it changes into mathematical signs or notations. But there are also those to whose whim it speaks in a very strange way.