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.
Interpretation
Well-written novels foster empathy by allowing readers to step into the shoes of different characters.
This quote by Olga Tokarczuk highlights the transformative power of literature, suggesting that through well-crafted storytelling, readers can experience life from perspectives vastly different from their own. By immersing oneself in another's reality, the reader not only gains a deeper understanding of that character but also develops a broader emotional intelligence and empathy for others, demonstrating the miraculous ability of fiction to transcend identity and foster connection.
In practice
In a discussion about the impact of literature in a classroom setting.
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.
How we think about the world and - perhaps even more importantly - how we narrate it have a massive significance, therefore, a thing that happens and is not told ceases to exist and perishes.
We read five words on the first page of a really good novel and we begin to forget that we are reading printed words on a page; we begin to see images.
I am not the kind of director who sits in a chair smoking a cigar talking with a microphone to 10 assistants. I need to move. To touch. To put a painting on a wall. To arrange a set.
With all the main characters that I write, it's always very important to me that they have good and bad aspects of their personality. It's important to me that they're complicated and that they're human.
I don't torture myself. And I do the work because of the pleasure involved. I'm satisfying a compulsion I find nigh-on irresistible. It's not necessarily because of the work itself. I just feel the need for a period of regeneration afterwards. Like leaving a field fallow when you've grazed too much on it. I feel depleted.
The Image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy.
A writer’s life is in his work, and that is the place to find him.
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