Top 120 Olga Tokarczuk Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “A large tree, crooked and full of holes, survives for centuries without being cut down, because nothing could possibly be made out of it. This example should raise the spirits of people like us. Everyone knows the profit to be reaped from the useful, but nobody knows the benefit to be gained from the useless.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

52. “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

53. “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

54. “The last time I had brought him maps, for I had heard that nothing cures melancholy like looking at maps.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

55. “Being healthy is an insecure state and does not bode well. It’s better to be ill in a quiet way, then at least we know what we’re going to die of.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

56. “Reject everything, do not look, shut your eyes and change your gaze, awaken another one that almost everyone has, but that few use.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

57. “Other people’s life stories are not a topic for debate. One should hear them out, and reciprocate in the same coin.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

58. “I believe, unswervingly, agonizingly, that it is in freaks that Being breaks through to the surface and reveals its true nature.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

59. “I find the satellite pictures and the curvature of the Earth very moving. So is it true that we live on the surface of a sphere, exposed to the gaze of the planets, left in a great void, where after the Fall the light was smashed to smithereens and blown apart? It is true. We should remember that every day, for we do tend to forget.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

60. “It occurred to me that every unjustly inflictd death deserved public exposure. Even an Insect’s. A death that nobody noticed was twice as scandalous.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

61. “Reality has grown old and gone senile; after all, it is definitely subject to the same laws as every living organism – it ages.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

62. “Whose intellect can have had the audacity to judge who is better, and who worse?”

— Olga Tokarczuk

63. “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

64. “It’s clear that the largest things are contained in the smallest. There can be no doubt about it. At this very moment, as I write, there’s a planetary configuration on the table, the entire Cosmos if you like: a thermometer, a coin, an aluminum spoon and a porcelain cup. A key, a cell phone, a piece of paper and a pen. And one of my gray hairs, whose atoms preserve the memory of the origins of life, of the cosmic Catastrophe that gave the world its beginning.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

65. “I am already at an age and additionally in a state where I must always wash my feet thoroughly before bed, in the event of having to be removed be an ambulance in the Night.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

66. “Imagination is essentially creative; it is a bridge reconciling matter and spirit. Especially when it is done intensely and often. Then the image turns into a drop of matter, and joins the currents of life. Sometimes along the way something in it gets distorted and changes. Therefore, if they are strong enough, all human desires come true – but not always entirely as expected.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

67. “To my mind, Death should be followed by the annihilation of matter. That would be the best solution for the body. Like this, annihilated bodies would go straight back into the black holes whence they came. The Souls would travel at the speed of light into the light. If such a thing as the Soul exists.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

68. “Fluidity, mobility, illusoriness – these are precisely the qualities that make us civilized.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

69. “It is widely known, after all, that real life takes place in movement.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

70. “Newspapers rely on keeping us in a constant state of anxiety, on diverting our emotions away from the things that really matter to us. Why should I yield to their power and let them tell me what to think?”

— Olga Tokarczuk

71. “They weren’t real travelers: they left in order to return. And they were relieved when they got back, with a sense of having fulfilled an obligation.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

72. “What makes us most human is the possession of a unique and irreproducible story, that we take place over time and leave behind our traces.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

73. “In a certain sense this was true, and truth is always true in a certain sense;.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

74. “There must be some sort of drugs. I’d like that. To stop me from feeling anything, or worrying, to let me sleep. Is that possible.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

75. “Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

76. “God created man with eyes in the front, not the back of the head, and that means we’ve got to think about what’s to come, not what has been.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

77. “The truth is terrible: describing is destroying.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

78. “From nature’s point of view no creatures are useful or not useful. That’s just a foolish distinction applied by people.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

79. “Its Animals show the truth about a country,” I said. “Its attitude toward Animals. If people behave brutally toward Animals, no form of democracy is ever going to help them, in fact nothing will at all.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

80. “What is the point of a law that applies only to some? The law should be observed for everyone without exception, wherever our ships and our money are able to take us.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

81. “Reality has grown old and gone senile; after all, it is definitely subject to the same laws as every living organism – it ages. Just like the cells of the body, its tiniest components, the senses, succumb to apoptosis. Apoptosis is natural death, brought about by the tiredness and exhaustion of matter. In Greek this word means “the dropping of petals.” The world has dropped its petals.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

82. “The prison is not outside, but inside each of us.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

83. “At night I observe Venus, closely following the transitions of this beautiful Damsel. I prefer her as the Evening Star, when she appears as if out of nowhere, as if by magic, and goes down behind the Sun. A spark of eternal light. It is at Dusk that the most interesting things occur, for that is when simple differences fade away. I could live in everlasting Dusk.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

84. “Within our bodies disintegration inexorably advances; soon we shall fall sick and die. Our loved ones will leave us, the memory of them will dissolve in the tumult; nothing will remain. Just a few clothes in the wardrobe and someone in a photograph, no longer recognized. The most precious memories will dissipate. Everything will sink into darkness and vanish.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

85. “People are always far away.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

86. “Annushka also needs to feel someone’s gaze on her, to feel that her crying is witnessed by someone, to feel it isn’t just addressing a void.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

87. “They weren’t real travelers: they left in order to return.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

88. “There are some things we may not understand, but we can sense them perfectly well.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

89. “Everything is hypothetical in hell.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

90. “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.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

91. “People think they live more intensely than animals, than plants, and especially than things. Animals sense that they live more intensely than plants and things. Plants dream that they live more intensely than things. But things last, and this lasting is more alive than anything else.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

92. “But why should we have to be useful and for what reason? Who divided the world into useless and useful, and by what right? Does a thistle have no right to life, or a Mouse that eats the green in a warehouse? What about Bees and Drones, weeds and roses? Whose intellect can have had the audacity to judge who is better, and who worse?”

— Olga Tokarczuk

93. “The old method for dealing with bad dreams is to tell them aloud above the toilet bowl, and then flush them away.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

94. “If people could read the same books, they would inhabit the same world.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

95. “But the truth is that anyone who feels Anger, and does not take action, merely spreads the infection.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

96. “The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

97. “What is life, after all if not dancing on graves?”

— Olga Tokarczuk

98. “This was how the end must look. No deluge, no rains of fire, no Auschwitz, no comet. This is how the world will look when God has deserted it, whoever he is. Like an abandoned house, everything coated in cosmic dust, muggy and steeped in silence. Everything living will congeal and grow mold in the light that has no pulse and therefore is dead. In this spectral light everything will crumble.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

99. “A thing that is not talked about ceases to exist.”

— Olga Tokarczuk

100. “It’s hard work talking to some people, most often males.”

— Olga Tokarczuk