Top 35 Olga Tokarczuk Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Olga Tokarczuk Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

The English book world is relatively closed to translat

The English book world is relatively closed to translation, so only a small amount of foreign language work can come in.
Olga Tokarczuk
I believe in literature which ties people together, that highlights what people have in common, despite the differences – color, sexual orientation, or anything which may separate us on the surface.
Olga Tokarczuk
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.
Olga Tokarczuk
I have never met anyone who wasn’t confused inside.
Olga Tokarczuk
I believe absolutely that words must be treated as material weapons, every invective or threat as violence and aggression.
Olga Tokarczuk
I got my first passport in 1989, when I was 28.
Olga Tokarczuk
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.
Olga Tokarczuk
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.
Olga Tokarczuk
I tell stories and try to do it honestly so that people are interested and enjoy them.
Olga Tokarczuk
I would like to say to my friends in Poland: Let’s make good choices, vote for democracy.
Olga Tokarczuk
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.
Olga Tokarczuk
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.
Olga Tokarczuk
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.
Olga Tokarczuk
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.
Olga Tokarczuk
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.’
Olga Tokarczuk
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.
Olga Tokarczuk
The views I have, the books I write, are read as political, or even as manifestos.
Olga Tokarczuk
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.
Olga Tokarczuk
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.
Olga Tokarczuk
When I was a teenager I fell in love with TS Eliot.
Olga Tokarczuk
I didn’t believe that the Soviet Union would ever break down.
Olga Tokarczuk
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.
Olga Tokarczuk
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.
Olga Tokarczuk
Seeing everything means recognizing the ultimate fact that all things that exist are mutually connected into a single whole, even if the connections between them are not yet known to us.
Olga Tokarczuk
To write is to look for very particular, specific points of view on reality.
Olga Tokarczuk
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.
Olga Tokarczuk
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.
Olga Tokarczuk
Polish literature can be interesting to the world. I’m happy to be the trailblazer.
Olga Tokarczuk
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.
Olga Tokarczuk
Polish culture has always had a strong anti-Semitic undercurrent. There has been awful persecution.
Olga Tokarczuk
I’m too neurotic to be a therapist.
Olga Tokarczuk
Reading English novels I always adore the ability to wr

Reading English novels I always adore the ability to write without fear about inner psychological things that are so delicate.
Olga Tokarczuk
Flights’ grew out of a time when I was travelling a lot.
Olga Tokarczuk
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.
Olga Tokarczuk
The world is a fabric we weave daily on the great looms of information, discussions, films, books, gossip, little anecdotes.
Olga Tokarczuk