Primeval And Other Times Quotes
"To walk at a brisk pace across Primeval from north to south would take an hour, and the same from east to west. And if someone wanted to go right round Primeval, at a slow pace, taking a careful, considered look at everything, it would take him a whole day, from morning to evening."
"For it is God’s business to create, and people’s business to name."
"Every year in late spring it spills onto the priest’s meadows and basks there in the sunshine, letting the frogs multiply by the thousand."
"The White River is shallow and sprightly. It spills down a wide channel in the sand and has nothing to hide. It is transparent and the sun is reflected in its limpid, sandy bottom. It looks like a great shining lizard."
"Below the mill the rivers merge. First they flow close beside each other, undecided, overawed by their longed-for intimacy, and then they fall into each other and get lost in one another."
"An angel generally sees everything in a different way. Angels perceive the world not through the physical forms which it keeps producing and then destroying, but through the meaning and soul of those forms."
"The only instinct angels have is the instinct for sympathy. The only feeling angels have is infinite sympathy, heavy as the firmament."
"Knowledge that is only grown on the outside changes nothing inside a man, or merely changes him on the surface, as one garment is changed for another."
"Everything around Cornspike was one single body, and her body was a part of this great body – enormous, omnipotent, unimaginably mighty."
"Youth in its intensity, in its full force, tires itself out. One night or one morning a man crosses a boundary, reaches his peak and takes his first step downwards, towards death."
"The greatest deception of youth is optimism of any kind, a persistent faith in the idea that something will change or improve, or that there is progress in everything."
"The vessel had broken inside him, full of the despair he had always carried within him like hemlock."
"The Virgin Mary of Jeszkotle was the pure will to provide help for the sick and the weak."
"In a world where war has pushed every kind of law beyond its limits, miracles often occur."
"Hope came back to him as he stood on the bridge and saw the Black and White Rivers merging together in a never-ending wedding."
"Like every person, Misia was born broken into pieces, incomplete, in bits."
"People think they live more intensely than animals, than plants, and especially than things. But things last, and this lasting is more alive than anything else."
"Man is incapable of creating out of nothing – that is a divine skill."
"Everything pushes us apart. You’re young, I’m old. You’re a Jew and I’m a Pole. You’re from Jeszkotle, I’m from Primeval. You’re single, and I’m married."
"I fell in love with you as soon as I saw you. Instantly. Love like that never ends."
"People think madness is caused by a great, dramatic event, some sort of suffering that is unbearable."
"The moon was disturbing her. She told the neighbours it was watching her."
"The masterwort planted Cornspike on his hips and took root in her rhythmically, deeper and deeper, pervading her entire body."
"He watched as she grew, as her first teeth fell out, and in their place new ones appeared – white, too large for her little mouth."
"For a moment he wondered whose the smaller ones were, and when he realised, he felt disconcerted, like a young boy."
"Now, as he looked at the lines of washing, he was filled with anger at the idea that time could run so fast."
"She’s alive," said Cornspike. "But it’s always the case that at first you die."
"Within the harmony of the eight heavens, the sensitive ears of the angels picked up a clattering sound like the noise of a cup falling and smashing to smithereens."
"Genowefa loved Izydor the way you love a dog or a crippled, helpless small animal. It was the purest human compassion."
"Busy with the ponds, Squire Popielski’s mind had a lot to do: he had to plan, ponder, count, create, and devise."
"In the thirty-eighth year of his life Squire Popielski felt as if he had discovered sex."
"The squire’s body had given up – it too was disintegrating."
"The squire had a crushing, ghastly feeling that the world, and everything that was good and bad in it, was passing him by."
"The time for some tribes is coming to an end. Therefore I will give you something that should now become your property."
"Everything would shake in its foundations and finally cave in like the roof of an old house. People would stop mattering – Boski would destroy the entire world."
"Sometimes he managed to gather this hatred somewhere in the area of his jaws, and then he felt a great strength in himself."
"In the beginning there was no God. There was no time or space. There was just light and darkness. And it was perfect."
"Praying to Himself through the mouths of people, He discovers contradiction in Himself, for in the mirror the reflection can be real, and reality can pass into the reflection."
"A house starts to exist as soon as its walls enclose a bit of space within them. It is this enclosed space that is the soul of the house."
"I’m going to pray to your husband, and you mind my dog."
"Imagining is essentially creative; it is a bridge reconciling matter and spirit."
"Sometimes along the way something in it gets distorted and changes. Therefore, if they are strong enough, all human desires come true – but not always entirely as expected."
"The moon is just a mask for the sun. He puts it on when he comes out at night to keep an eye on the world."
"Human suffering carves dark furrows on my face. One day I’ll be extinguished by human pain."
"Why on earth were you born if you’re only going to sleep?"
"People – who themselves are in fact a process – are afraid of whatever is impermanent and always changing."
"God is present in every process. God is vibrating in every transformation."
"At the beginning of time God created all possible things, but He Himself is the God of impossible things, things that either do not happen at all, or happen very rarely."
"That something had to end, in order for something new to begin. That it was dreadful, but it had to be like that."
"I realised that the Wola Road was now the front line. Exactly."
"It's not about whether God exists or not. It's not like that. To believe, or not to believe, that is the question."
"If He does, then it matters to me that I believe. If He doesn't, it doesn't cost me anything to believe."
"But it's not true that believing costs nothing."
"Either God exists and has always existed, or God doesn't exist and never has. Or else God used to exist, but no longer does. And finally, God doesn't yet exist and has yet to appear."
"The whole world is just one big mess, or, even worse, like a sort of machine, a broken chaff-cutter that only works on blind impulse …"
"He guides and runs it all, He makes the laws and adapts everything to fit Him …"
"The quality of what Izydor saw was temporality. Under a colourful outer coating everything was merging in collapse, decay, and destruction."
"There’s a tiny spark in you that will never go out. And I’ve got one in me, too."
"It’s instinct, in other words, something you can’t control."
"Why are you crying? Feeling sorry for the animal?"
"The paralysis is attacking my mind, but even so I still exist somewhere."
"You have to live. You have to bring up children, earn a living, keep on studying and climbing upwards."
"In this entire, bizarre tale there was nothing certain or permanent, nothing to get a grip on. There was just an endless struggle, some unfulfilled dreams and unsatisfied desires."
"Sometimes you're so clever. And sometimes so stupid."
"If she lies there for a while, she starts to sense the mushroom spawn in another way, too – because the spawn slows down time."
"In Brazil the cities enjoyed all kinds of riches, and the people looked happy and contented."
"God talks to Himself whenever He is particularly beset by loneliness."
"The mushroom spawn is not a plant or an animal. It cannot gain strength from the sun, because its nature is alien to the sun."
"He lay on his back in the rough, elusive present, and felt that with every passing second he was dissolving into non-existence."
"Trees live thanks to matter, by absorbing juices that flow from deep in the ground and by turning their leaves to the sunlight. The tree’s soul rests after going through many existences."
"To trees people seem eternal – they have always been walking through the shade of the lime trees on the Highway, neither frozen still nor in motion."
"God created the Sixth World by accident, and then went away. He made it any old how, haphazardly."
"Human thinking is inseparably linked with swallowing time. It is a sort of choking."
"Dolly knows that God exists. She perceives Him all the time, and not, like people, just in rare moments."
"In Dolly’s small dog’s brain there is no channel, no organ to filter the passage of time. So Dolly lives in the present."
"An animal’s emotion is even purer, not clouded by any thoughts."
"Man harnesses his suffering to time. He suffers as a result of the past and extends his suffering into the future. In this way he creates despair."
"For animals, God is a painter. He spreads the world before them in the form of panoramic views."
"Time went by, and the squire’s wife left a little room in her prayers to thank it for passing, for continuing to move and, by doing so, introducing changes into people’s lives."
"He fascinated him that an amorphous, indefinite substance could be given various shapes."
"He behaved as if those soles and boots of his were going to save humanity."
"The world changed so greatly after the war. He couldn’t find his place in it, so he died."
"Maybe every normal family has to have a sort of normality safety valve, someone who takes upon himself all those little bits of madness we carry inside us."
"Everything will be fine. The world is different now from how it once was. Better, bigger, brighter."
"But the memory of what they had seen remained inside them. And he who has once seen the world’s borders will suffer his imprisonment most painfully of all."
"Time had not been kind to Stasia Papuga, and it was not surprising the drivers refused to believe she was Inspector Boski’s sister."
"She would accompany him to the bus stop on the Kielce road. At the crossroads lay a stone. Stasia picked up the stone and asked: 'Put your hand here. I’ll have it as a memento of you.'"
"He remembered the border in the forest, that invisible wall. That border was for him."
"And he felt as if he had put down the first few words of an extremely important phrase."
"He saw these same landscapes at each season of the year – snowy in winter, green in spring, colourful in summer, and faded in autumn."
"Things that did not immediately reveal their inner fourfold structure presented Izydor with a challenge."
"The world is not friendly to mankind, and the only thing to be done is to find a shell for yourself and your loved ones, and stay in there until you are released."
"The sky is cracking like desiccated wood, the earth has decayed in places and now falls apart under the feet of animals and people."
"Anything that does not move is at a standstill. Anything that comes to a standstill falls apart."
"As they looked at Misia sitting in bed, with her legs covered by a blanket and her face absent, they wondered what her thoughts were like."
"But what they feared most was that in the fervour of dying, the separating of the soul from the body or the fading of the biological structure of the brain, Misia Boska would be gone forever."
"It was enough not to think about the woods and the river for one single day, not to think about his mother and Misia combing her chestnut hair."
"Dying involved the systematic disintegration of what had been Izydor. It was a very rapid, irreversible process, self-perfecting and marvellously effective."