Andrzej Stasiuk Quotes
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It is the West’s provincialism, which leads it to perceive the rest of the continent as a failed copy of itself.
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Sometimes it seems to me that things hold together only thanks to the borders, that the true identify of these lands and peoples is the shape of their territories in an atlas. It's a stupid thought, but I can't shake it.
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Now it all seems so simple. Events intersect free of any logic of sequence; they cover space and time in an even, translucent layer. Memory re-creates them from the back, from the front, or sideways, but to them it makes no difference.
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It gives me no rest, my wish to know the fate of all these scenes that entered my eyes and have remained in my thoughts. What happens to them when I am no longer there?
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This modernizing experiment seems to have something diabolic about it. Everything that was becomes rejected in the name of a modernity that assumes the nature of a fiction, an illusion, a devilish apparition. To a greater or lesser extent this applies to all the postcommunist countries.
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Freedom has become a commodity whose availability, paradoxically, keeps society in check. The threat of its loss seems to enable us to tolerate its imposition.
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Perhaps we become aware of our existence only when we feel on our skin the touch of a place that has no name, that connects us to the earliest time, to all the dead, to prehistory, when the mind first stood apart from the world, still unaware that it was orphaned.
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Travel is no more than a relatively healthy form of narcotic, after all.
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The future is fiction. It will come, of course, we hear about it all the time, but the old wisdom knows that only what is, and what was, exists. The rest does not, because no one ever saw it or touched it.
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It drew us, because life is made of bits of the present that stay in the mind. The world itself, really, is made of that.