The Books of Jacob

by Olga Tokarczuk

Poverty is nondenominational and has no national identity.

“God created man with eyes in the front, not the back of the head, and that means we’ve got to think about what’s to come, not what has been.”

God might have said to himself: I cannot have a person who is simultaneously free and fully subject to me. I cannot

have a creature free from sin who would be at the same time a person. Better sinful humanity than a world without men.

My soul will not let itself be locked in any prison, iron cage or cage made out of air. My soul wants to be like a ship in the sky, and the body’s boundaries cannot hold it back. And no walls will ever imprison it: not those that have been built by human hands, nor the walls of politeness, nor the walls of civility or good manners. It will not be entrapped by pompous speeches, by kingdoms’ borders, good breeding—anything. My soul flies over all of that with the greatest ease, it is above what is contained in words, and beyond what cannot even be contained in words. It is beyond pleasure and beyond fear. It exceeds what is lovely and lofty just as it does what is terrible and vile.

Help me, merciful God, and keep life from wounding me. Give me the ability to speak, give me language and words, so that I might speak the truth of You.

“He who is full of himself has no space left for God.”

There is nothing that brings greater relief than the certainty that there is someone who really knows. For we ordinary people never have such certainty.

Maybe the whole art of writing, my dear friend, is the perfection of imprecise forms . . .

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.