Giuliana > Giuliana's Quotes

“I believe, unswervingly, agonizingly, that it is in freaks that Being breaks through to the surface and reveals its true nature.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“There is too much world, so it's better to concentrate on particulars, rather than the whole.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“She’s a loner, she doesn’t care about being around people. So neither failure nor success concerns her.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“Describing something is like using it – it destroys; the colours wear off, the corners lose their definition, and in the end what’s been described begins to fade, to disappear. This applies most of all to places. Enormous damage has been done by travel literature – a veritable scourge, an epidemic. Guidebooks have conclusively ruined the greater part of the planet; published in editions numbering in the millions, in many languages, they have debilitated places, pinning them down and naming them, blurring their contours. Even I, in my youthful naiveté, once took a shot at the description of places. But when I would go back to those descriptions later, when I’d try to take a deep breath and allow their intense presence to choke me up all over again, when I’d try to listen in on their murmurings, I was always in for a shock. The truth is terrible: describing is destroying.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“Standing there on the embankment, staring into the current, I realized that—in spite of all the risks involved—a thing in motion will always be better than a thing at rest; that change will always be a nobler thing than permanence; that that which is static will degenerate and decay, turn to ash, while that which is in motion is able to last for all eternity.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“I wasn’t in a hurry. I never have to be in any particular place at any particular time. Let time watch me, not me it.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“Then you realize: night gives the world back its natural, original appearance, without suger-coating it; day is a flight of fancy, light a slight exception, an oversight, a disruption of the order. The world in fact is dark, almost black. Motionless and cold.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“Move. Get going. Blessed is he who leaves.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“Nothing is innocent, and nothing is insignificant, it's all a big endless puzzle.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“It is widely known, after all, that real life takes place in movement.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“The truth is terrible: describing is destroying.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“Everything is hypothetical in hell.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“This is in essence what interested him the most: In what way do such distinct substances as the body and the soul connect in the human body and act upon one another?”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“Anyone who has ever tried to write a novel knows what an arduous task it is, undoubtedly one of the worst ways of occupying oneself. You have to remain within yourself all the time, in solitary confinement. It’s a controlled psychosis, an obsessive paranoia manacled to work, completely lacking in the feather pens and bustles and Venetian masks we would ordinarily associate with it, clothed instead in a butcher’s apron and rubber boots, eviscerating knife in hand.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“People are always far away.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“(the face turns out to be one of the most superficial characteristics of the whole human form),”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“Then you realize: night gives the world back its natural, original appearance, without sugar-coating it; day is a flight of fancy, light a slight exception, an oversight, a disruption of the order. The world in fact is dark, almost black. Motionless and cold.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“She is happy, because she doesn’t have a single thought in her head, a single care, a single expectation or hope. It’s a good feeling.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“A syndrome is small, portable, not weighed down by theory, episodic. You can explain something with it and then discard it. A disposable instrument of cognition. Mine is called Recurrent Detoxification Syndrome. Without the bells and whistles, its description boils down to the insistence of one’s consciousness on returning to certain images, or even the compulsive search for them. It is a variant of the Mean World Syndrome, which has been described fairly exhaustively in neuropsychological studies as a particular type of infection caused by the media. It’s quite a bourgeois ailment, I suppose. Patients spend long hours in front of the TV, thumbing at their remote controls through all the channels till they find the ones with the most horrendous news: wars, epidemics, and disasters. Then, fascinated by what they’re seeing, they can’t tear themselves away. The symptoms themselves”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“The planet’s witnessing the appearance of a new creature now, ones that have already conquered all continents and almost every ecological niche. They travel in packs and are anemophilous, covering large distances without difficulty.
Now I see them from the window of the bus, these airborne anemones, whole packs of them, roaming the desert. Individual specimens cling on tight to brittle little desert plants, fluttering noisily-perhaps this is the way they communicate.
The experts say these plastic bags open up a whole new chapter of earthly existence, breaking nature’s age-old habits. They’re made up of their surfaces exclusively, empty on the inside, and this historic forgoing of all content unexpectedly affords them great evolutionary benefits.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“Constellation, not sequencing, carries truth. This is why travel psychology envisions man in equivalently weighted situations, without trying to lend his life any—even approximate—continuity. Life is made up of situations. There is, of course, a certain inclination toward the repetition of behaviors. This repetition does not, however, mean that we should succumb in our imaginations to the appearance of any sort of consistent whole.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“In a certain sense this was true, and truth is always true in a certain sense;”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“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.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“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.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“to someone from nowhere, every movement turns into a return”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“I would like to step out of my heart
And go walking beneath the enormous sky.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“That life is not for me. 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. I’ve tried, a number of times, but my roots have always been shallow; the littlest breeze could always blow me right over. I don’t know how to germinate, I’m simply not in possession of that vegetable capacity. I can’t extract nutrition from the ground, I am the anti-Antaeus. My energy derives from movement—from the shuddering of buses, the rumble of planes, trains’ and ferries’ rocking.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“In reality, movement doesn’t exist. Like the turtle in Zeno’s paradox, we’re heading nowhere, if anything we’re simply wandering into the interior of a moment, and there is no end, nor any destination.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“You know what, sometimes it seems to me we're living in a world that 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.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

“The prison is not outside, but inside each of us. Perhaps we simply don't know how to live without it.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead