Olga Tokarczuk Quotes

There was no breakthrough, I’ve always been like this – I’ve always been interested in animals, their rights, vegetarianism. I know there are many people like that around me.

I started to think more about just jumping from one point to the other. It’s like opening the windows on your computer, you have so many spaces. Or it’s like turning on your television–there’s another metaphor–you can jump from one channel to another. And that was the effect, the outcome of my thinking about the novel. Of course it was shocking for some readers. But I think that I was right.

The flood of stupidity, cruelty, hate speech and images of violence are desperately counterbalanced by all sorts of “good news,” but it hasn’t the capacity to rein in the painful impression, which I find hard to verbalize, that there is something wrong with the world. Nowadays this feeling, once the sole preserve of neurotic poets, is like an epidemic of lack of definition, a form of anxiety oozing from all directions.

Art is a huge space for cognitive and conscious experiments, and it uses different sorts of efforts to describe reality. Tale, fairy tale, metaphor, parable are tools that literature has been using for centuries.

Reportage is the prince of Polish literature. Love for reportage is a request from the readers: Tell us how it is in the world, what the truth is, don’t make anything up. I’m very concerned about this resistance to literary imagination. People lose the ability to understand metaphors, transposition, all other stylistic literary devices used to date.

And of course, literature is a very specific way of understanding the world and very specific and very raffinated, special, sophisticated way of communication. So, I would like, in my writing, I would like to try just a kind of general ideas of instruction, how to deal with those very dangerous things connected with climate changes. So, please understand that I am not an activist. This is what I’m going to say. I’m going to write about it in my own language, in using my imagination to make our consciousness broader.

We live in a reality of polyphonic first-person narratives, and we are met from all sides with polyphonic noise. What I mean by first-person is the kind of tale that narrowly orbits the self of a teller who more or less directly just writes about herself and through herself. We have determined that this type of individualized point of view, this voice from the self, is the most natural, human and honest, even if it does abstain from a broader perspective. Narrating in the first person, so conceived, is weaving an absolutely unique pattern, the only one of its kind; it is having a sense of autonomy as an individual, being aware of yourself and your fate. Yet it also means building an opposition between the self and the world, and that opposition can be alienating at times.

Today our problem lies—it seems—in the fact that we do not yet have ready narratives not only for the future, but even for a concrete now, for the ultra-rapid transformations of today’s world. We lack the language, we lack the points of view, the metaphors, the myths and new fables. Yet we do see frequent attempts to harness rusty, anachronistic narratives that cannot fit the future to imaginaries of the future, no doubt on the assumption that an old something is better than a new nothing, or trying in this way to deal with the limitations of our own horizons. In a word, we lack new ways of telling the story of the world.

A dream fulfilled is often disappointing. It has turned out that we are not capable of bearing this enormity of information, which instead of uniting, generalizing and freeing, has differentiated, divided, enclosed in individual little bubbles, creating a multitude of stories that are incompatible with one another or even openly hostile toward each other, mutually antagonizing.

The first thing is that we don’t trust reality as much as you do. Reading English novels, I always adore the ability to write without fear about inner psychological things that are so delicate. In such a form you can develop a story in a very linear way, but we don’t have this patience. We feel that in every moment something must be wrong because our own story wasn’t linear. Another difference is that you are rooted in psychoanalysis while we’re still thinking in a mythical, religious way.

I know that there are many kinds of studying, called creative writing for instance and the people then trying to learn how to write, how to live in writing, because for me, writing is rather a psychological process, not just the process of writing on a paper, even not inventing a story, but something which is very deeply connected with our psychological side. So, I think that there is only one advice, to read, to read. I think read and read, and for every single one written page it is always one thousand pages which should be read.

I think the one, the most important one that there is every single human being is the source of a novel, it’s a source of many stories. So, we are living in a world that like, more or less, five billion of stories, novels, in potential state existing still around us.

Perhaps in order not to drown in the multiplicity of titles and last names we began to divide literature’s leviathan body into genres, which we treat like the various different categories of sports, with writers as their specially trained players.

I’m afraid nobody nowadays has the courage to speak about what’s going to happen. Predictions never come true. We live in a world of fear of the future. Astrological thinking is based on thinking in cycles. It’s the same in economics. To my mind, the most interesting are the long cycles, which take a few centuries, revealing certain historical truths that aren’t seen when one is reading the world ad hoc through the media. Astrology is an ancient art invented a few thousand years ago, which miraculously continues. A human projects some order on the planetary setting, then their perception of the world is refracted and returned with totally different knowledge. This is fascinating. I had always been interested in astrology, but only had basic knowledge about it. the imagination. Sometimes I regret that contemporary people distance themselves so much from such old, beautiful ways for pondering reality.

So, I remember myself dreaming about to be a part of a cosmic expedition and work in science checking how the human body is relating with cosmic space, it was a very fantastic idea. Of course, I think that I overestimated the time of development of science. Now I can realise that this is the same subject in my books – thank you for this question.