The Empusium Quotes

“We are shaped not by what is strong in us but by the anomaly, by whatever is weak and not accepted.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story

“Do you know what is the most common mistake people make when they’re in danger? Each one thinks their life is unique, and that death doesn’t affect them. No one believes in their own death. Do you think I believe in my own death?”
― Olga Tokarczuk, The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story

“Our senses impose on us a particular kind of knowledge of the world. And they are limited, aren’t they? But what if the world around us is entirely different than our imperfect senses try to convince us?”
― Olga Tokarczuk, The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story

“The worst thing possible is to feel fully valued by others, and particularly – as I would put it – to be considered of standard value. It means we become literalized, and we come to a halt in the development that a lack of full appreciation prompts us to strive towards. When a person recognizes that he has become perfect and fulfilled, he should kill himself.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story

“Just then he is overcome by a familiar sense of sadness, typical of those convinced of their own impending death. The world around him feels like stage scenery painted on a paper screen, as if he could stick a finger into this monumental landscape and drill a hole in it leading straight to nothingness. And as if nothingness will start
pouring out of there in a flood, and will catch him up too, grab him by the throat. He has to shake his head to be rid of this image. It shatters into droplets and falls onto the leaves.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story

“Anxiety is the fruit of ignorance.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story

“He was impatient because everything fell short of his imagination and expectations, as if what he thought about the world came from other, higher realms of the spirit. Moreover, since his youth he had been sure he was unique, but somehow the world was unable to accept the fact. (page 123)”
― Olga Tokarczuk, The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story

“We may be similarly disabled inhabitants of a world that consists of three dimensions, and we shall never know what a four-dimensional world is like. Do you see? We have no tools or senses to introduce us to a world with an extra dimension, let alone a fifth, and a seventh, and a twenty-sixth. Our minds cannot conceive of it.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story

“Shouldn’t women dress up in some sort of uniform too, and wear medals according to how many children they’ve had, how many dinners they’ve cooked, or how many patients they’ve nursed? That would be both beautiful and fair.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story

“The entire conversation sounded like the mutterings of people who do not need words to communicate.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story

“Każdy z nas siedzi okrakiem na granicy między własnym światem wewnętrznym a światem zewnętrznym i niebezpiecznie balansuje. To bardzo niewygodna pozycja i niewielu udaje się utrzymać równowagę.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Empuzjon

“Am I going to die?' he asked one of the candles. It did not immediately answer. Its flame flickered, as if unsettled by this question. 'Only very small or very large things are immortal,' it said cautiously. 'Atoms are immortal and galaxies are immortal. That's the whole mystery. The range of death is very specific, like a radio wave.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story

“The light that fell in here was mottled by the stained-glass windows of the treetops, where every leaf was like a piece of crystal playing with the light according to its own rules. Wojnicz walked along a central nave toward an altar in the distance, not yet visible, but everything foretold it—this was a church full of labyrinths, side naves, crypts beneath the stones, tabernacles hidden in holes in the trees, altars materializing on the mossy trunks of toppled beeches. This church was not at all definite, like a man-made church, but a place of constant change: of water into life, and of light into matter. Everything here was rustling, swelling, gathering, growing and multiplying, budding and trilling. The green moss and gray lichen made the forest seem carpeted in Persian rugs—in velveteen, sheepskin, woolly felt and soft flannel. Why on earth hadn’t he come here sooner?”
― Olga Tokarczuk, The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story

“Here we are watching them, as usual from below, we see them like big, strong columns topped by small, chattering projections—their heads. Their feet mechanically crush the forest litter, snap the small plants, tear up the moss, and squash the tiny bodies of insects that have failed to heed the vibrations heralding imminent annihilation. For a short while after they pass, beneath the forest floor the mushroom spawn quivers, that vast, immense, motherly structure transmits information to itself—where the intruders are, and in which direction they are bending their steps.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story

“He had studied Greek at school, but the teacher used to hit them with a ruler across the hands, so now he associated the language with a sudden, burning pain that, though short-lived, pierced to the bone. That was how the poetry of Homer had been recorded in his flesh.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story

“If you, young person, were to ask me what the soul is, I would answer like this: The soul is the weakest thing within us. Your soul is in your morbid symptoms.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story

“Inside all of us there’s a feeling of not being of standard value, the belief that we lack something that everyone else possesses. All our lives we must come to terms with this sense of inferiority, overcome it or”
― Olga Tokarczuk, The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story

“People have their fictions and believe what they have mutually agreed upon. But you know, it’s not necessarily true that things are only like this or that. It’s simply”
― Olga Tokarczuk, The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story

“Each of us reaches the set upper limit of his personal potential, and thereafter ceases to develop. That is the basis of old age, this incapacity for change. We stop on our own journey. It happens to some people in midlife, and to others as soon as they finish their education. Yet others go on developing into ripe old age, right up to death in fact, but they are a rarity.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story

“He preferred to belong to this world, which did not yet know him and in whose eyes he still had time to define himself. He would rather take the risk that one day this world too would disappoint him, and he would have to run away again, escape to yet another, more distant location to avoid falling into the arms of that familiar, hopeless state in which one was simply a bother to oneself and others.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story

“All these matters absorbed his mind, drawing the world inside, into the large, chaotic space that each of us carries within like an invisible piece of luggage that we drag after us all our lives, without knowing why. Our true self.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story

“Why should God want sacrifices when he can take whatever he likes? Why should he be given something when he possesses it all anyway?”
― Olga Tokarczuk, The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story

“Shouldn’t women dress up in some sort of uniforms too”
― Olga Tokarczuk, The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story

“As we know, however, the most interesting things are always in the shadows, in the invisible.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story

“All the wrongs that happened in the past have not ceased to exist, they continue to resonate and make us tremble inside.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story

“To be a man means learning to ignore whatever causes trouble.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story

“Do you know what is the most common mistake people make when they’re in danger? Each one thinks their life is unique”
― Olga Tokarczuk, The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story

“people needed sacrifices to have a sense of their own causality in the face of God.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story

“From mid-October, fine, sunny days set in. A few cold nights had caused the trees to turn red and yellow, and in the second week of the month Wojnicz suddenly awoke to an entirely altered setting—now he was surrounded by every possible shade of yellow, orange and red, still interwoven here and there with retreating green. The frenzy of colors, highlighted by the blue chill of the sky, was intoxicating, and Wojnicz even felt like asking Thilo for some paints so that he could document this astonishing transformation. Colored leaves were falling onto the cobbled streets, as though some force were trying to carpet the hard surface in a mosaic pattern. How much the world had softened, how much it had mellowed! Masses of swallowtail butterflies as big as sparrows, suddenly awakened by the sunlight, were bouncing off the windowpanes as they sought shelter from the approaching cold, only to die helplessly on the sills.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story

“the artificial division of people according to such feeble categories as the place where they were born did not suit the complexity of the question of identité.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story