Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

by Olga Tokarczuk

It’s in the touch of the earth, at its point of contact with the body that the whole mystery is located—the fact that we’re built of elements of matter, while also being alien to it, separated from it.

Now it looked calm and satisfied, as if the spirit were pleased to be finally free of the matter, and the matter were pleased to be finally free of the spirit. In this short space of time a metaphysical divorce had occurred.

always stop a while to admire the constructive cooperation of hands and mind,

The motion of the planets is always hypnotic, beautiful, impossible to halt or hasten.

It must hurt, just as a river must flow and fire must burn.

“It’s happening all the time and everywhere,”

The fields breathe evenly at the foot of the Table Mountains, surely created purely for the purpose of looking pretty.

Every thing possible to be believ’d is an image of truth.

Winter mornings are made of steel; they have a metallic taste and sharp edges.

and one’s eyes to fill with tears of emotion. These people make one feel as if a stronger memory of our former innocence remains in them, as if they were a freak of nature, not entirely battered by the Fall.

It’s clear that the largest things are contained in the smallest.

“When one can’t speak, one should write,” she said. “It helps a lot,”

“From nature’s point of view no creatures are useful or not useful. That’s just a foolish distinction applied by people.”

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.”