“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?”

“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.”

“I lack the imagination. For that reason I have to pack, stuff into my pockets odds and ends, passport, money, and go see what it's really like. Whenever the time of year or the weather changes, I have to pack up whatever I can't do without and visit all those places I've been before, to make sure they still exist”

“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.”

“With events that have passed there is no problem, provided we don't attempt to be wiser that they are, provided we can't use them to further own own ends. If we let them be, the turn into a marvelous solution, a magical acid that dissolves time and space, eats calendars and atlases, and turns the coordinates of action into sweet nothingness. What is the meaning of the riddle? What is the use to anyone of chronology, sister of death?”

“That's why I drove there in the middle of February, patches of snow still on the fields. I had the strong feeling that somewhere between Sluejow, Wygwizdow, and Solec time had ground to a halt or simply evaporated or melted like a dream and no longer separated us from our childhood.”

“it is the West’s provincialism, which leads it to perceive the rest of the continent as a failed copy of itself”