The Books of Jacob

by Olga Tokarczuk

maybe they can reach some understanding by way of books? Is this not in fact the only possible route? If people could read the same books, they would inhabit the same world.

Asher has these kinds of thoughts fairly frequently, and then he starts to be afraid.

Asher Rubin thinks that most people are truly idiots, and that it is human stupidity that is ultimately responsible for introducing sadness into the world. It isn’t a sin or a trait with which human beings are born, but a false view of the world, a mistaken evaluation of what is seen by our eyes.

it feels like everyone is playing, the whole world, and like cards unite people better than faith or language. You sit down at the table, you fan out your cards, and there follows an order that is understandable to anyone. And one must simply adapt to that order, if one wishes to win. The bishop thinks it’s like a kind of new language that unites them in a brotherhood for that one night.

The story of the priest’s life is the story of the books he read and wrote. A true writer has no biography.

Only vermin might be ranked beneath them. Even cows and horses, and especially dogs, get better care.

people’s misery was so great it seemed impossible the world could go on any longer.

Hence comes that tiring, destructive feeling that one is always guilty, from birth, that one is stuck in sin and that everything is sin—doing something, not doing it, love, hate, words, and even thoughts. Knowledge is a sin, and ignorance is a sin.

The best medicine for fear and anxiety is the writing box.

Maybe there are some truths that elude the capacity of reason, maybe not everything can be contained within the Scriptures, maybe a new entry needs to be created for his Gitla, something about people like her. Maybe she actually is a Polish princess, in her soul . . .

The shift is not yet noticeable, but the angels have begun their cleaning: they take the rug of the world in both hands and shake it out, letting the dust fly. Soon they’ll roll it up again.

The land they ought to receive from those of us who have too much of it—”

everything has seemed unbearably sad to her, so that a great sorrow for the whole world often overwhelms her. And just underneath that sorrow is an anger that crosses over oddly easily into sympathy, and suddenly in the face of the enormity of the misfortunes of the world, she can only throw up her hands, and all of it brings her to tears.

A person who is a stranger gains a new point of view, becomes, whether he likes it or not, a particular type of sage.

books are like soldiers. They should always be standing at attention, one after the next. Like an army of mankind’s wisdom.”

there is a secret little understanding that exists between the defendant and his interpreter,

Jakubowski gathers wax and squeezes together new candles from the scraps.

And so I, too, surrender to the guidance of my own Hand, my own Head, Voices, the Ghosts of the Dead, God, the Great Virgin, Letters, Sefirot. I go sentence by sentence, blindly down the line, and although I don’t know what awaits me at the end, I patiently stumble forward, not inquiring into the price I will have to pay, and even less so about any reward. My friend and ally is that moment, that urgent hour, the dearest time to me, when suddenly out of nowhere the writing gets easy, and then everything appears to be wonderfully able to be expressed.

the world itself demands to be narrated, and only then does it truly exist, only then can it flourish fully. But also that by telling the story of the world, we are changing the world.

We are living in Hayah’s board game—we are the little figures molded out of bread by her nimble fingers. We move around the circles drawn over the board, meeting one another, and everyone is a task and a challenge for everyone else. And now we are approaching the decisive place—one toss of the dice and we will gain or lose everything.

we are all traveling in the same carriage, and we ought to care about each other—to take care of each other—not rip scraps from one another’s mouths like hostile dogs.

The truth is something that can be expressed in many tales, for it is like that garden the sages entered, in which each of them saw something else.

I have nonetheless tried to remind them who they are and whence our path has led. For is it not so that our stories are told to us by others? We can know ourselves to the extent that others tell us who we are and what it is we’re struggling to do. What would I remember of my childhood, were it not for my mother?

If human beings had only known how to truly preserve their knowledge of the world, if they had just engraved it into rock, into crystals, into diamond, and in so doing, passed it on to their descendants, then perhaps the world would now look altogether otherwise. For what are we to do with such a brittle stuff as paper? What can come of writing books?

theological foundations of democracy needed to be investigated,

“The kind anyone can read, that will tell things as they were,”

“You’re a writer, just make up whatever’s missing,”