Quotes from Olga Tokarczuk

With age, many men come down with testosterone autism, the symptoms of which are a gradual decline in social intelligence and capacity for interpersonal communication, as well as a reduced ability to formulate thoughts.

Those of us who think God addresses us by means of external events are wrong, as naive as children. For he whispers directly into our innermost souls.

He saw it. Not in front, or behind him, just somewhere out in the darkness. It was huge and powerful. The whiteness of its fur gleamed in the light of the snow. 'Wolf, in the name of the Polish border I beg you to spare my life,' he said into the darkness. The wolf stopped behind him, wondering.

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.

The inn looks quite luxurious, but their host explains that as the plague has racked up victims, people have grown more and more afraid to leave their homes, terrified to purchase things from those who have been stricken.

But why should we have to be useful and for what reason? Who divided the world into useless and useful, and by what right? Does a thistle have no right to life, or a Mouse that eats the green in a warehouse? What about Bees and Drones, weeds and roses? Whose intellect can have had the audacity to judge who is better, and who worse?

We discussed the function of defense mechanisms and found that we were humbled by the power of that portion of our psyche, we began to understand that if it weren't for rationalization, sublimation, denial—all the little tricks we let ourselves perform—if instead we simply saw the world as it was, with nothing to protect us, honestly and courageously, it would break our hearts.

To tell the truth, I like the concept of evil people who eliminated each other, in a chain.

We should have some other collection of knowledge, then, to balance that one out — its inverse, its inner lining, everything we don't know, all the things that can't be captured in any index, can't be handled by any search engine. For the vastness of these contents cannot be traversed from word to word — you have to step in between the words, into the unfathomable abysses between ideas.

The world itself demands to be narrated, and only then does it truly exist, only then can it flourish fully. But also that by telling the story of the world, we are changing the world. That is why God created the letters of the alphabet, that we might have the opportunity to narrate to him what he created. Reb Mordke always chuckled at this. "God is blind. Did you not know that?" he would say. "He created us that we would be his guides, his five senses.

Everything about my own face that seemed to me familiar and obvious had vanished; what remained was a distinctive scattering of dots that symbolized the planets set against the celestial vault. I cannot be someone other than I am. How awful.

There are two points of view in the world: the frog's perspective and bird's-eye view. Any point in between just leads to chaos.