Quotes from Olga Tokarczuk

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

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.

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

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

That the world itself demands to be narrated, and only then does it truly exist, only then can it flourish fully.

We live in a state of siege. If one takes a close look at each fragment of a moment, one might choke with terror. Within our bodies disintegration inexorably advances; soon we shall fall sick and die. Our loved ones will leave us, the memory of them will dissolve in the tumult; nothing will remain. Just a few clothes in the wardrobe and someone in a photograph, no longer recognized. The most precious memories will dissipate. Everything will sink into darkness and vanish.

I cannot be someone other than I am. How awful.

For it is God's business to create, and people's business to name.

I felt as if the words I had spoken that day had soiled my tongue and mouth.

Dizzy," I said, "it's Animals taking revenge on people." Dizzy always believes me, but this time he wasn't listening.

God gave animals a lower rank, in the service of man.