Flights Quotes

“The island state is a state of remaining within one’s own boundaries, undisturbed by any external influence; it resembles a kind of narcissism or even autism.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“If something hurts me, I erase it from my mental map. Places where I stumbled, fell, where I was struck down, cut to the quick, where things were painful—such places are simply not there any longer. This means I’ve gotten rid of several big cities and one whole province. Maybe someday I’ll eliminate a country.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“So he has found something he hadn’t noticed before. He has to light a cigarette, he’s so excited. He looks at that mysterious word, it will guide him now, he’ll let it up with the wind like a kite and follow it. “Kairos,” Kunicki reads, “Kairos,” repeating it, unsure how it’s pronounced. It has to be Greek, he thinks happily, Greek, and he dives into his bookshelves, but there’s no Greek dictionary there, only Useful Latin Phrases, a”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“The tip of his penis rises like a vector, pointing out the window, toward the world.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“I pass billboards that announce in black and white, in English, 'Jesus loves even you'. I feel uplifted by the unexpected encouragement; I'm only slightly alarmed by the 'even'. (page 336)”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“There are countries out there where people speak English. But not like us - we have our own languages hidden in our carry-on luggage, in our cosmetics bags, only ever using English when we travel, and then only in foreign countries, to foreign people. It's hard to imagine, but English is their real language. They don't have anything to fall back on or turn to in moments of doubt.

How lost they must feel in the world, where all instructions, all the lyrics of the stupidest possible songs, all the menus, all the excruciating pamphlets and brochures - even the buttons in the lift! - are in their private language. They may be understood by anyone at any moment, whenever they open their mouths. ... Wherever they are, people have unlimited access to them - they are accessible to everyone and everything! (page 182/3)”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“He looks like a guy who discovered not so long ago that he's not really so different from everybody else - thus attaining, in other words, his own enlightenment. (page 408)”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“The flight attendants, beautiful as angels, check to make sure we're fit to travel, and then, with a benevolent motion of the hand, permit us to plunge on into the soft, carpet-lined curves of the tunnel that will lead us aboard our plane and onto a chilly aerial road to new worlds. That smile of theirs hold - or so it strikes us - a kind of promise that perhaps we will be born anew now, this time in the right time and the right place.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“She thought about how hno one had taught us to grow old, how we didn't know what it would be like. When we were young we though of old age as an ailment that affected only other people. While we, for reasons never entirely clear, would remain young. We treated the old as though they were responsible for their condition somehow, as though they'd done something to earn it, like some types of diabetes or arteriosclerosis. And yet this was an ailment that affected the absolute most innocent.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“j’ai pris conscience que ce qui est en mouvement – en dépit de ses dangers – sera toujours meilleur que ce qui est immobile, et que le changement sera toujours quelque chose de plus noble que l’invariance ; car ce qui stagne est voué inévitablement à la dégénérescence, à la décomposition et, en fin de compte, au néant, alors que tout ce qui évolue saura durer, et même éternellement.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Les Pérégrins

“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

“Do not leave any unexplained, unnarrated situations, any closed doors; kick them down with a course.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“Every body part deserves to be remembered. Every human body deserves to last. It is an outrage that it's so fragile, so delicate. It is an outrage that it's permitted to disintegrate underground, or given the mercy of flames, burned like trash.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“death renders all faces similar.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“And what a stroke of luck that such a book had fallen into the hands of such a person in such a place.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“Whenever I set off on any sort of journey I fall off the radar. No one knows where I am. At the point I departed from? Or at the point I'm headed to? Can there be an in-between?”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“...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. With every step we'll slip and fall.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“I love the idea of reading books as a brotherly, sisterly moral obligation to one's people.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“How will he get by in the desert without bowls and plates, without coal stoves, without carpets to lie down on with the little ones? Without his toilet, without the view from the window onto the square and the fountains with their crystal-clear water.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“Do not leave any unexplained, unnarrated situations, any closed doors; kick them down with a curse, even the ones that lead to embarrassing and shameful hallways you would prefer to forget. Don't be ashamed of any fall, of any sin... He who has not mastered the art of speaking shall remain forever caught in a trap.”
― 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

“This is how she understands it: life on this planet gets developed by some powerful force contained in every atom of organic matter. It's a force there is no physical evidence of, for the time being- you can't catch it on even the most precise microscopic images, nor in photographs of the atomic spectrum.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“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

“Description is akin to overuse—it destroys; the colors 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. Which is why you have to be very careful. It’s better not to use names: avoid, conceal, take great caution in giving out addresses, so as not to encourage anyone to make their own pilgrimage. After all, what would they find there? A dead place, dust, like the dried-out core of an apple. The Clinical Syndromes”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“Ma már azonban tudom: aki a rendet keresi, kerülje a pszichológiát. Válassza inkább a fiziológiát vagy a teológiát, legalább szilárd támaszra lel - vagy az anyagban, vagy a szellemben; nem csúszik el a pszichikumon.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“Descubrí que, —pese a todos los peligros— siempre sería mejor lo que se movía que lo estático, que sería más noble el cambio que la quietud, que lo estático estaba condenado a desmoronarse, degenerar y acabar reducido a la nada, lo móvil, en cambio, duraría incluso toda una eternidad.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Los errantes

“There's too much in the world. It would be wiser to reduce it, rather than expanding or enlarging it . . . But I fear it may already be too late. We have no choice now but to learn how to endlessly select.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“just the number three. And yet that year the first chapters of Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium and the entirety of De humani corporis fabrica by Vesalius appeared.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“Drawing is never reproducing—in order to see, you have to know how to look, and you have to know what you’re looking at.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“[…] knowing the aim of a journey, you know enough about a person.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights