Top 120 Olga Tokarczuk Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Everything will pass. The wise Man knows this from the start, and has no regrets.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

2. “Standing there on the embankment, staring into the current, I realized that – in spite of all the risks involved – a thing in motion will always be better than a thing at rest; that change will always be a nobler thing than permanence; that that which is static will degenerate and decay, turn to ash, while that which is in motion is able to last for all eternity.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

3. “The prison is not outside, but inside each of us. Perhaps we simply don’t know how to live without it.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

4. “The best conversations are with yourself. At least there’s no risk of a misunderstanding.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

5. “You know what, sometimes it seems to me we’re living in a world that we fabricate for ourselves. We decide what’s good and what isn’t, we draw maps of meanings for ourselves... And then we spend our whole lives struggling with what we have invented for ourselves. The problem is that each of us has our own version of it, so people find it hard to understand each other.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

6. “When we were young we thought of old age as an ailment that affected only other people.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

7. “Fluidity, mobility, illusoriness – these are precisely the qualities that make us civilised. Barbarians don’t travel. They simply go to destinations or conduct raids.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

8. “She is happy, because she doesn’t have a single thought in her head, a single care, a single expectation or hope. It’s a good feeling.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

9. “Perhaps that’s the whole point of prayer – to think to yourself in peace, to want nothing, to ask for nothing, but simply to sort out your own mind. That should be enough.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

10. “Long years of unhappiness cause a Person worse degradation than a fatal illness.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

11. “Winter mornings are made of steel; they have a metallic taste and sharp edges. On a Wednesday in January, at seven in the morning, it’s plain to see that the world was not made for Man, and definitely not for his comfort or pleasure.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

12. “Your memory creates postcard images, but it doesn’t really comprehend the world at all. That’s why a landscape is so affected by the mood of the person looking at it. In it a person sees his own inner, transitory moments. Wherever he looks, he sees nothing but himself.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

13. “With age, many men come down with testosterone autism, the symptoms of which are a gradual decline in social intelligence and capacity for interpersonal communication, as well as a reduced ability to formulate thoughts.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

14. “That’s what I dislike most of all in people – cold irony. It’s a very cowardly attitude to mock or belittle everything, never be committed to anything, not feel tied to anything. Like an impotent man who can’t experience pleasure himself, but will do all he can to ruin it for others.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

15. “One for sorrow, two for joy. So they said when I was a child, but there were fewer Magpies then.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

16. “We have a view of the world, but Animals have a sense of the world, do you see?”

— Olga Tokarczuk

17. “In a way, people like her, those who wield a pen, can be dangerous. At once a suspicion of fakery springs to mind – that such a Person is not him or herself, but an eye that’s constantly watching, and whatever it sees it changes into sentences: in the process it strips reality of its most essential quality – its inexpressibility.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

18. “There is too much world, so it’s better to concentrate on particulars, rather than the whole.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

19. “There are two points of view in the world: the frog’s perspective and bird’s-eye view. Any point in between just leads to chaos.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

20. “Sometimes it’s as if I’m composed of nothing but symptoms of illness, I am a phantom built out of pain.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

21. “Then you realize: night gives the world back its natural, original appearance, without suger-coating it; day is a flight of fancy, light a slight exception, an oversight, a disruption of the order. The world in fact is dark, almost black. Motionless and cold.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

22. “Obsession is, in any case, the premonition of the existence of an individual language, an irreproducible language through the attentive use of which we will be able to uncover the truth. We must follow this premonition into regions that to others might seem absurd and mad. I don’t know why this language of truth sounds angelic to some, while to others it changes into mathematical signs or notations. But there are also those to whose whim it speaks in a very strange way.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

23. “But it also crossed my mind that in spite of all, in spite of our fragility and ignorance, we have an incredible advantage over the stars – it is for us that time works, giving us a major opportunity to transform the suffering, aching world into a happy and peaceful one.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

24. “I wasn’t in a hurry. I never have to be in any particular place at any particular time. Let time watch me, not me it.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

25. “As I gazed at the black-and-white landscape of the Plateau I realized that sorrow is an important word for defining the world. It lies at the foundations of everything, it is the fifth element, the quintessence.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

26. “In reality, movement doesn’t exist. Like the turtle in Zeno’s paradox, we’re heading nowhere, if anything we’re simply wandering into the interior of a moment, and there is no end, nor any destination.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

27. “I find this division of people into three groups – skiers, allergy sufferers and drivers – very convincing. It is a good, straightforward typology. Skiers are hedonists. They are carried down the slopes. Whereas drivers prefer to take their fate in their hands, although their spines often suffer as a result; we all know life is hard. Whereas the allergy sufferers are always at war. I must surely be an allergy sufferer.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

28. “The human psyche evolved in order to defend itself against seeing the truth. To prevent us from catching sight of the mechanism. The psyche is our defense system – it makes sure we’ll never understand what’s going on around us. Its main task is to filter information, even though the capabilities of our brains are enormous. For it would be impossible for us to carry the weight of this knowledge. Because every tiny particle of the world is made of suffering.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

29. “Desire in itself is empty, in other words it merely indicates direction, but never destination; destinations, in any case, always remain phantasmagoric and unclear; the closer we get to them, the more enigmatic they become.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

30. “She thought about how no one had taught us to grow old, how we didn’t know what it would be like. When we were young we thought of old age as an ailment that affected only other people. While we, for reasons never entirely clear, would remain young. We treated the old as though they were responsible for their condition somehow, as though they’d done something to earn it, like some types of diabetes or arteriosclerosis. And yet this was an ailment that affected the absolute most innocent.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

31. “Nothing is innocent, and nothing is insignificant, it’s all a big endless puzzle.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

32. “There are some people at whom one only has to glance for one’s throat to tighten and one’s eyes to fill with tears of emotion. These people make one feel as if a stronger memory of our former innocence remains in them, as if they were a freak of nature, not entirely battered by the Fall. Perhaps they are messengers, like the servants who find a lost prince who’s unaware of his origins, show him the robe that he wore in his native country, and remind him how to return home.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

33. “She’s a loner, she doesn’t care about being around people. So neither failure nor success concerns her.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

34. “That’s too much. You can’t want all those things,’ he said. ‘Oh yes I can! And I’m the one to define what I can want,’ I shouted furiously.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

35. “This is in essence what interested him the most: In what way do such distinct substances as the body and the soul connect in the human body and act upon one another?”

— Olga Tokarczuk

36. “People are built like houses inside- they have stairwells, spacious halls, vestibules that are always too weakly lit to count the doors into the rooms, row upon row of apartments, damp chambers, slimy, tiled bathrooms with cast-iron baths, steps with handrails taut as veins, artery-like corridors, joint-like landings, passages, guest rooms, draughty chambers into which a sudden current of warm air flows, closets, twists and turns and cubby-holes, and larders full of forgotten supplies.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

37. “Nobody takes any notice of old women who wander around with their shopping bags.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

38. “I know the date of my own death, and that lets me feel free.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

39. “Move. Get going. Blessed is he who leaves.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

40. “Postcards of landscapes, panoramas of old ruins, postcards ambitiously prepared so as to show as much as possible on that flat space, are slowly being replaced by photographs focusing on details. This is no doubt a good idea, because they relieve tired minds. There is too much world, so it’s better to concentrate on particulars, rather than the whole.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

41. “Someday he would write his memoirs, when his adventures had arranged themselves into a suitably attractive package.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

42. “Newspapers rely on keeping us in a constant state of anxiety, on diverting our emotions away from the things that really matter to us.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

43. “A man’s free to do what he wants with his life, until he falls foul of the banks.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

44. “Anger always leaves a large void behind it, into which a flood of sorrow pours instantly, and keeps on flowing like a great river, without beginning or end.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

45. “The best place for this kind of training is Holland where people, convinced of their utter innocence, do not use curtains. After dusk the windows turn into little stages on which actors act out their evenings. Sequences of images bathed in yellow, warm light are the individual acts of the same production entitled ‘Life’. Dutch painting. Moving lives.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

46. “Constellation, not sequencing, carries truth. This is why travel psychology envisions man in equivalently weighted situations, without trying to lend his life any – even approximate – continuity. Life is made up of situations. There is, of course, a certain inclination toward the repetition of behaviors. This repetition does not, however, mean that we should succumb in our imaginations to the appearance of any sort of consistent whole.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

47. “But children aren’t people. Children become people when they wriggle out of your arms and say “no.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

48. “Drawing is never reproducing – in order to see, you have to know how to look, and you have to know what you’re looking at.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

49. “Anyone who has ever tried to write a novel knows what an arduous task it is, undoubtedly one of the worst ways of occupying oneself. You have to remain within yourself all the time, in solitary confinement. It’s a controlled psychosis, an obsessive paranoia manacled to work, completely lacking in the feather pens and bustles and Venetian masks we would ordinarily associate with it, clothed instead in a butcher’s apron and rubber boots, eviscerating knife in hand.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

50. “One has to tell people what to think. There is no alternative. Otherwise, someone else will do it.”

— Olga Tokarczuk