Reality is like a doughnut: Everything that is good and funny and juicy is outside the center, which is just emptiness.
Interpretation
Reality has a core of emptiness, while the richness of life is found in the outer experiences.
Olga Tokarczuk's quote suggests that the essence of reality is not found at its center, which represents emptiness, but rather in the myriad of experiences and joys that exist outside of that center. It highlights the complexity and richness of life, indicating that true fulfillment and humor lie in exploring and embracing the external aspects of existence rather than getting caught up in the void at the core.
In practice
This quote can be used in a motivational speech to emphasize the importance of embracing life's adventures.
But the fact is we did have colonies in the east of Poland, we did have a slave economy there. But this is not common knowledge - or part of our national myth. It goes against the current romanticised view of the government, and much of the country, that Poles have always been victims, never oppressors.
My books are not 'political.' I don't make political demands. They actually describe life. But when we look at human life, politics creeps in everywhere.
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.
The world is a fabric we weave daily on the great looms of information, discussions, films, books, gossip, little anecdotes.
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.
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.
Bigotry is an incapacity to conceive seriously the alternative to a proposition.
Traditionally, I have responded to the transcendent mystics of all religions. I have always responded with breathless excitement to anyone who has ever said that God does not live in a dogmatic scripture or in a distant throne in the sky, but instead abides very close to us indeed- much closer than we can imagine, breathing right through our own hearts.
Possibility, infinity, beauty -- none of those words were right. [...] What he really wanted to say was: have you felt this? this phantom life streaking like a phosphorescent hound at the edges of your ruin?
It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand.
I'm appalled that the word 'feminism' has been denigrated to a place of almost ridicule and I very passionately believe the word needs to be revalued and reintroduced with power and understanding that this is a global picture. It isn't about us and them.
I began life as an absolute monarchist - on condition, of course, that I be that monarch.
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