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Olga Tokarczuk Quotes
born 1962 Poland
Olga Nawoja Tokarczuk (born 29 January 1962) is a Polish writer, activist and public intellectual. She is one of the most critically acclaimed and successful authors of her generation in Poland; in 2019, she was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature as the first Polish female prose writer.
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Language directs perspective and, as such, always carries a value judgment; it evaluates reality by choosing what will be described or discussed.
Every change in the world starts with some kind of idea, reflection or thought.
We’re living in such a crazy world that we need to redefine what a novel is for us.
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.
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.
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.
As I writer, I have courage to be—to ask questions and not to find an answer because then I should change my job and try to be a scientist. And this is the better freedom, to be a writer. Just ask and show strange things.
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.
I keep wondering if these days it’s possible to find the foundations of a new story that’s universal, comprehensive, all-inclusive, rooted in nature, full of contexts and at the same time understandable.
Nobel Prize lecture (2019)
That is why I believe I must tell stories as if the world were a living, single entity, constantly forming before our eyes, and as if we were a small and at the same time powerful part of it.
Nobel Prize lecture (2019)
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