Top 65 Quotes & Sayings by Olga Tokarczuk
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk.
Last updated on December 25, 2024.
I found Leonora Carrington's 'The Hearing Trumpet' really funny.
Unfortunately, as hate speech has proliferated, no one in Poland has been held responsible. The police take people's statements and dismiss them. This tacit consent has demoralized weakened minds.
But sometimes I fear that the people of my country can unite only beside victims' bodies, over coffins and in cemeteries. Like tribesmen who dance around old totems, we ignore the living and can only appreciate the dead.
I got my first passport in 1989, when I was 28.
State television, from which a significant number of Poles get their news, consistently smears, in aggressive and defamatory language, the political opposition and anyone who thinks differently from the ruling party.
The world is a fabric we weave daily on the great looms of information, discussions, films, books, gossip, little anecdotes.
Polish culture has always had a strong anti-Semitic undercurrent. There has been awful persecution.
I found that traveling on my own created a different state of mind because when you travel with your partner or a friend there is an endless tendency to exchange information, feelings and associations.
The first photograph I ever experienced consciously is a picture of my mother from before she gave birth to me. Unfortunately, it's a black-and-white photograph, which means that many of the details have been lost, turning into nothing but gray shapes.
Sometimes I wonder how my life would have worked out if my books had been translated into English sooner, because English is the language that's spoken worldwide, and when a book appears in English it is made universal, it becomes a global publication.
I realized that we don't travel in such a linear way anymore but rather jump from one point to another and back again. So I got this idea for a 'constellation' novel recounting experiences that were separate from each other but could still be connected on different psychological, physical and political levels.
I think I always have many ideas for books in my head. It's like a forest full of mushrooms. Some are big, some are small.
I tell stories and try to do it honestly so that people are interested and enjoy them.
I adore Stanley Kubrick, all of his films were different, not just in subject but tonally.
How we think about the world and - perhaps even more importantly - how we narrate it have a massive significance, therefore, a thing that happens and is not told ceases to exist and perishes.
I didn't believe that the Soviet Union would ever break down.
When we talk about books, we rarely talk about the economic side of writing, especially of writing literary works, and that, at base, it's a pretty costly enterprise.
A novel should tell a story, be a pleasure to read, and at the same time it should be thought-provoking, even a bit instructive.
From death's perspective, there are no differences between people; there are no presidents or flight attendants, no faiths or nations. There is just the person, always dear.
In a certain sense we can be proud to have introduced this hairstyle to Europe. 'Plica polonica' should be added to the list of our inventions, alongside crude oil, pierogi and vodka.
I first read Sigmund Freud's 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle' as a young girl, and it helped me to understand that there are thousands of possible ways to interpret our experience, that everything has a meaning, and that interpretation is the key to reality. This was the first step to becoming a writer.
We invented a history of Poland as a tolerant, open country, a country that has not been tainted by any atrocities committed against its minorities.
There is no official censorship in literature, but I feel a certain fear when I see that a kind of self-censorship is developing in Poland. Authors are somehow afraid of expressing what they really think or feel because they fear political consequences.
Well-written novels make you more empathetic towards other people. You can identify with someone who isn't you. You can change your identity. A 14-year-old boy can become Anna Karenina. It is a miracle.
Two centuries ago, when our nation lost its sovereignty and was partitioned among Russia, Prussia and Austria, Polish Romantics like the poet and nationalist Adam Mickiewicz declared that independence would come only with great sacrifice. Ever since, this myth of the martyr, or messianic victim, has emerged during times of national crisis.
In today's world everything is political. We are a statement - our clothes, haircut, the way we act.
When I was a teenager I fell in love with TS Eliot.
To write is to look for very particular, specific points of view on reality.
If your country is wiped off the map and your language is banned, if your literature has to serve a cause, it becomes, however brilliant, rather hard to travel.
I dream of Poland becoming a modern society that is defined not by the crippling nature of history, but by our individual achievements, a sense of our own self-worth and ideas for the future.
I'm too neurotic to be a therapist.
In a healthy, normal society, people can disagree with one another, even have diametrically opposing views, and this does not at all mean that they must hate one another. The Polish authorities, however, have made the division of Poles their primary task.
I decided to write a crime novel. That genre was at the height of its popularity in Poland, so I thought it might earn me a bit of cash to go on with my work on 'The Books of Jacob.' I shut myself away for a few months and devoted myself entirely to 'Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead.'
We know so much about planets and the universe and small particles and we do not know anything about the inner state of our own bodies, we do not know about this microcosm we have inside our skin.
It's impossible to be ethnically pure.
Novels can change attitudes. Maybe we should speak quietly otherwise politicians will use novels as propaganda.
I like to come back to the science fiction of Stanislaw Lem. He is comforting but also funny, and although I know his books, there's always something new to discover.
My books are not 'political.' I don't make political demands. They actually describe life. But when we look at human life, politics creeps in everywhere.
The views I have, the books I write, are read as political, or even as manifestos.
I write books to open people's minds, to present new perspectives, to make people realize that what they think is obvious is not so obvious, that you can look at a trivial situation from a different angle and suddenly reveal other meanings and levels.
But the fact is we did have colonies in the east of Poland, we did have a slave economy there. But this is not common knowledge - or part of our national myth. It goes against the current romanticised view of the government, and much of the country, that Poles have always been victims, never oppressors.
I would like to say to my friends in Poland: Let's make good choices, vote for democracy.
I have never met anyone who wasn't confused inside.
Everything that was interesting was outside of Poland. Great music, art, film, hippies, Mick Jagger. It was impossible even to dream of escape. I was convinced as a teen-ager that I would have to spend the rest of my life in this trap.
I don't have a clear biography of my own that I could recount in an interesting way. I'm made up of the characters that I pulled out of my head, that I invented.
I think the deepest level of our freedom is being able to change our identity.
Flights' grew out of a time when I was travelling a lot.
I've never been a great fan of crime fiction. I read Agatha Christie in my youth, but that's all.
Education, school should prepare us not to morally judge everyone, but to be able to find our own truth in this world of various points of view.
Reading English novels I always adore the ability to write without fear about inner psychological things that are so delicate.
I'm not one of those people who easily judges something or someone.
I create doubt in the reader's mind. That is what literature is for: to provoke, to raise doubts, to talk about things that are not obvious.
Poland was once a powerful imperial country that disappeared from maps of Europe for more than 100 years. It was partitioned and occupied by the Nazis and the Russians... We pop up and disappear and we do not trust what we are told to believe.
We can feel in Poland a kind of phantom pain for lost multi-ethnic territories.
The English book world is relatively closed to translation, so only a small amount of foreign language work can come in.
Reality is like a doughnut: Everything that is good and funny and juicy is outside the center, which is just emptiness.
I love crossing borders.
Anglo-Saxons have a view that history is ordered and chronological, and I think that fed into the development of the realist middle-class novel. You know, the ones you read on your sofa with a nice cup of tea.
I believe absolutely that words must be treated as material weapons, every invective or threat as violence and aggression.
I think that first-person narration is very characteristic of contemporary optics, in which the individual performs the role of subjective center of the world.
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