Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
Olga Tokarczuk
Top 10 Best Quotes
“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.”
“The best conversations are with yourself. At least there's no risk of a misunderstanding.”
“But why should we have to be useful and for what reason? Who divided the world into useless and useful, and by what right? Does a thistle have no right to life, or a Mouse that eats the grain in a warehouse? What about Bees and Drones, weeds and roses? Whose intellect can have had the audacity to judge who is better, and who worse? A large tree, crooked and full of holes, survives for centuries without being cut down, because nothing could possibly be made out of it. This example should raise the spirits of people like us. Everyone knows the profit to be reaped from the useful, but nobody knows the benefit to be gained from the useless.”
“He was a man of very few words, and as it was impossible to talk, one had to keep silent. It’s hard work talking to some people, most often males. I have a Theory about it. With age, many men come down with testosterone autism, the symptoms of which are a gradual decline in social intelligence and capacity for interpersonal communication, as well as a reduced ability to formulate thoughts. The Person beset by this Ailment becomes taciturn and appears to be lost in contemplation. He develops an interest in various Tools and machinery, and he’s drawn to the Second World War and the biographies of famous people, mainly politicians and villains. His capacity to read novels almost entirely vanishes; testosterone autism disturbs the character’s psychological understanding.”
“The prison is not outside, but inside each of us. Perhaps we simply don't know how to live without it.”
“Everything will pass. The wise Man knows this from the start, and has no regrets.”
“That’s what I dislike most of all in people – cold irony. It’s a very cowardly attitude to mock or belittle everything, never be committed to anything, not feel tied to anything. Like an impotent man who can’t experience pleasure himself, but will do all he can to ruin it for others”
“Perhaps that’s the whole point of prayer – to think to yourself in peace, to want nothing, to ask for nothing, but simply to sort out your own mind. That should be enough.”
“Sometimes it’s as if I’m composed of nothing but symptoms of illness, I am a phantom built out of pain.”
“In a way, people like her, those who wield a pen, can be dangerous. At once a suspicion of fakery springs to mind – that such a Person is not him or herself, but an eye that’s constantly watching, and whatever it sees it changes into sentences: in the process it strips reality of its most essential quality – its inexpressibility.”
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Book Keywords:
perception, conversation, on-writing-on-writers, reality, misunderstanding, perspective, meaning
