The Books of Jacob

by Olga Tokarczuk

After all, the Jewish historian Josephus maintains the world was created in the autumn, at the autumn equinox. A reasonable notion, since of course there were fruits in paradise; given the apple hanging from the tree, it must indeed have been autumn…

Quote

If people could read the same books, they would inhabit the same world.

‘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.’

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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. Which is why people perceive every thing in isolation, each object separate from the rest. Real wisdom lies in linking everything together – that’s when the true shape of all of it emerges.

And there remain blades of grass that are succulent and green, as if they have forgotten it’s the end of October, and that it freezes at night.

How could she ever have believed in the flow of time? She had thought time flowed! Now she finds it funny. It’s obvious that time spins around like skirts whirling in a dance.

Jacob has begun to introduce himself not as before, not as Yankiele Leybowicz, but as Jacob Frank. Frank is what Jews from the west are called in Nikopol; that’s what they call his father-in-law and his wife, Hana. Frank, or Frenk, means foreign. Nahman knows Jacob likes this – being foreign is a quality of those who have frequently changed their place of residence. He’s told Nahman that he feels best in new places, because it is as if the world begins afresh every time. To be foreign is to be free.

To feel like a guest everywhere you go, occupying homes just for a while, not bothering about the garden, enjoying the wine without forming any attachment to the vineyard. Not to understand the language, and therefore to register gestures and faces better, the expressions in people’s eyes, the emotions that appear on faces like the shadows of clouds. To learn a foreign language from scratch, a little bit in every place, comparing words and finding orders of similarity. This state of foreignness must be carefully guarded, for it gives enormous power.

The further north you go, the more people concentrate on themselves, and in some sort of northern madness (no doubt due to the lack of sun) they ascribe to themselves too much. They make themselves responsible for their actions.

What is life, after all if not dancing on graves?

sometimes it happens that the souls of parents and children are fundamentally hostile to one another, and they meet in life in order to remedy this hostility.

On the other hand, maybe God was taking away my children so as to bring me closer to Jacob.

The Messiah has to fall as low as possible, otherwise he isn’t the Messiah.

Asher has learned that people have a powerful need to feel superior to others. It doesn’t matter who they are – they have to find someone who’s beneath them.

If you think you are capable of destruction, think how you could build.

When you live in a place and a time in which certain laws are in effect, then you must observe those laws, but never forgetting that they are only partial systems, never absolute. For the truth is something else, and if a person is not prepared to come to know it, then it may seem frightening and terrible, and that person may curse the day he learned of it. But I do believe that everyone can tell what kind of person he truly is. It is just that deep down, he doesn’t want to find out.

Moliwda knows that despite appearances, it is a happy marriage. Meaning: they each do their own thing.

‘There are many roads to God, it isn’t ours to judge.’ ‘Of course it’s ours. There are roads, and there’s the wilderness.’

In fact, no real heresy could ever come about in Polish. By its nature, the Polish language is obedient to every orthodoxy.

that the world itself demands to be narrated, and only then does it truly exist, only then can it flourish fully.

‘Everyone who seeks salvation must do three things: change his place of residence, change his name, and change his deeds.’

It is written that there are three things that do not come if you are thinking of them: the Messiah, lost objects, and scorpions.