Quotes from Olga Tokarczuk

Sometimes it happens that the souls of parents and children are fundamentally hostile to one another, and they meet in life in order to remedy this hostility.

Clearly I did not inherit whatever gene it is that makes it so that when you linger in a place you start to put down roots.

And that the world is a great big net, it is a whole, where no single thing exists separately; every scrap of the world, every last tiny piece, is bound up with the rest by a complex cosmos of correspondences, hard for the ordinary mind to penetrate.

It's a very cowardly attitude to mock or belittle everything, never be committed to anything, not feel tied to anything. Like an impotent man who can't experience pleasure himself, but will do all he can to ruin it for others.

There's a couple—she is nestled up into his chest, eyes closed, like she's trying to top off an interrupted night's sleep.

Only a piece of machinery could possibly carry all the world's pain. Only a machine, simple, effective and just. But if everything were to happen mechanically, our prayers wouldn't be needed.

Simply by the eternal laws of coincidence the key to room number nine gets lost most often by distracted travelers.

Whenever I set off on any sort of journey I fall off the radar. No one knows where I am.

There is only one thing we cannot have—eternal life, and, by God, whence did that concept come into our heads, that idea of being immortal?

Am I like that lost day when you fly east, and that regained night that comes from going west?

Or to a different law that hasn't been demonstrated and that we haven't even thought of yet that says that you can doubly not exist in the same place?

Apoptosis is natural death, brought about by the tiredness and exhaustion of matter. In Greek this word means 'the dropping of petals'. The world has dropped its petals.