Karolis Bareckas

“This is why tyrants of all stripes, infernal servants, have such deep-seated hatred for the nomads - this is why they persecute the Gypsies and the Jews, and why they force all free peoples to settle, assigning the addresses that serve as our sentences.
What they want is to create a frozen order, to falsify time's passage. They want for the days to repeat themselves, unchanging, they want to build a big machine where every creature will be forced to take its place and carry out false actions. Institutions and offices, stamps,newsletters, a hierarchy, and ranks, degrees, applications and rejections, passports, numbers, cards, elections results, sales and amassing points, collecting, exchanging some things for others.
What they want is to pin down the world with the aid of barcodes, labelling all things, letting it be known that everything is a commodity, that this is how much it will cost you. Let this new foreign language be illegible to humans, let it be read exclusively by automatons, machines. That way by night, in their great underground shops, they can organize reading of their own barcoded poetry.

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

“I grew up in a beautiful era, now sadly in the past. In it there was great readiness for change, and a talent for creating revolutionary visions. Nowadays no one still has the courage to think up anything new. All they ever talk about, round the clock, is how things already are, they just keep rolling out the same old ideas. Reality has grown old and gone senile; after all, it is definitely subject to the same laws as every living organism — it ages. Just like the cells of the body, its tiniest components — the senses, succumb to apoptosis. 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.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

“Hell is other people’s taste”
― Woody Allen, Apropos of Nothing

“Augau nuostabioje epochoje, deja, ji jau praėjo. Žmonės buvo pasirengę dideliems pokyčiams ir gebėjo austi revoliucines vizijas. Šiandien jau niekas neturi drąsos sugalvoti ką nors nauja. Be paliovos tik kalbama, kaip yra, ir plėtojamos senos idėjos. Tikrovė paseno, suruko, nes juk paklūsta absoliučiai tiems patiems dėsniams kaip kiekvienas gyvas organizmas – sensta. Jos smulkiausi elementai – prasmės patiria apoptozę, kaip kūno ląstelės. Apoptozė – tai natūrali mirtis, kurią lemia nuovargis ir materijos išsekimas. Graikiškai šį žodį galima versti „žiedlapių numetimas“. Pasaulis numetė žiedlapius.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead