Olga Tokarczuk Quotes

When people ask me where I am from I never say, 'Serbia.' I always say, 'I come from a country that no longer exists.'

Nations without a past are contradictions in terms. What makes a nation is the past, what justifies one nation against others is the past, and historians are the people who produce it.

I feel like the people from Iceland have a different relationship with their country than other places. Most Icelandic people are really proud to be from there, and we don't have embarrassments like World War II where we were cruel to other people.

In France, history is paralyzing.

All these nations and peoples of Europe and Asia will insist upon their independence and their own cultures.

A lot of people may not read the history of their own country, but they carry on memories transmitted by previous generations. They're trying to achieve something, [they] have their mission and anger -- all this is fed by past experience of history.

Germans have an understanding of history and cannot allow themselves to forget it. It may be a curse, but in some ways, it's a blessing. It makes them cautious.

We are not America. We are Afghanistan.

Look around at the countries of Europe, and you'll find that practically all of them have pasts that are just as tragic as Ireland's, yet the people seem able to find some creative way at moving into the future.

Every Sri Lankan, and almost every visitor to Sri Lanka, carries a longing for the place in some small form - hiraeth, the Welsh call it - wherever they go and whatever their background. It binds them however much the war and politics might try to divide them.

It’s a little strange, this obsession with the flag. It’s incomprehensible to someone who comes from a country where the flag has, so to speak, disappeared, where any nostalgia and concern for it is a sign of an attachment to the past…

A nation’s attitude toward its own history is like a window into its own soul.

A nation is a historical group of men of recognizable cohesion, held together by a common enemy.

I see her in tears, that land which, once the cradle of my nation, is today its tomb.

Happy is the nation without a history.

Cultural goods … are the source of the Nation's identity, continuity and development.

A Pole must accept everything Polish, both good and bad,..

Nothing is so retentive as a nation's memory.

Let us not allow the splits and splintering to frighten us. It is, indeed, a pity, but what can we do, since we are Bulgarians and all suffer from one common disease. If this disease had not been present in our ancestors, from whom we inherited it, they would have never fallen under the scepter of the Turkish Sultan ...

The sense of German history is a constantly repeated attempt to find the beginning.

Any nation that forgets its past cannot have a future.

Germany has spent the decades since World War II in national penance for Nazi crimes. America spent the decades after the Civil War transforming Confederate crimes into virtues. It is illegal to fly the Nazi flag in Germany. The Confederate flag is enmeshed in the state flag of Mississippi.

I started moving towards Serbia when I felt my country, Yugoslavia, was being taken away from me. My feeling of nationality was not as strong as those around me who were attaching themselves to these absurd new entities.

Israel is too attached to America, too influenced by America. It should be connected to Europe. America is based on mythology - the free man, the individual, the open frontier. Europe is more conscious of history. Take Britain and Shakespeare. You shape your identity through history.

Speaking as somebody who is half English and half Hungarian, World War I still seems to me a familiar and seismic event, as if it had only just ended.