Olga Tokarczuk

I stopped in the sloping market square, and gradually I felt flooded by a powerful sense of communion with the people passing by. Each man was my brother and each woman my sister. We were so very much alike. So fragile, impermanent, and easily destroyed. We trustingly went to and fro beneath the sky, which had nothing good in store for us.

How do we all look down here, as perceived by its senses? Like shadows? Like bundles of shudders, sources of noise

One has to tell people what to think. There’s no alternative. Otherwise someone else will do it.’

I put my arms around her, and there we stood together – a fake Wolf and a small woman in a pool of light from the firehouse window

The psyche is our defence system – it makes sure we’ll never understand what’s going on around us. Its main task is to filter information, even though the capabilities of our brains are enormous. For it would be impossible to carry the weight of this knowledge. Because every tiny particle of the world is made of suffering

For no human heart is capable of bearing so much pain. The whole, complex human psyche has evolved to prevent Man from understanding what he is really seeing. To stop the truth from reaching him by wrapping it in illusion, in idle chatter. The world is a prison full of suffering, so constructed that in order to survive one must inflict pain on others. Do you hear me?

Winter mornings are made of steel; they have a metallic taste and sharp edges. On a Wednesday in January, at seven in the morning, it’s plain to see that the world was not made for Man, and definitely not for his comfort or pleasure.

‘Drive your plow over the bones of the dead,’ I said to myself in the words of Blake; is that how it went?

It had freed him from the mess that was his life. And it had freed other living Creatures from him. Oh yes, suddenly I realized what a good thing death can be, how just and fair, like a disinfectant, or a vacuum cleaner.

Perhaps there were some angels watching over him; sometimes they turn up on the wrong side.