Top 92 Svetlana Alexievich Quotes
#1. often thought that the simple fact, the mechanical fact, is no closer to the truth than a vague feeling, rumor, vision. Why repeat the facts - they cover up our feelings.
Svetlana Alexievich
#3. The war - that's the only thing I can talk about. Why did we come here? To Chernobyl? Because no one's going to chase us out of here. No one will kick us off this land. It's not anyone's land now.
Svetlana Alexievich
#4. I hear about death so often that I don't even notice anymore. Have you ever heard kids talk about death? My seventh-graders argue about it: is it scary or not? Kids used to ask: where do we come from? How are babies made? Now they're worried about what'll happen after the nuclear war.
Svetlana Alexievich
#5. Do you know that it can be a sin to give birth? I'd never heard those words before. Katya
Svetlana Alexievich
#6. Life was full of adventure: I learnt the smell of danger - I've got a sixth sense for it now. We're homesick for it, some of us; it's called the 'Afghan syndrome'.
Svetlana Alexievich
#8. Pretty soon, I'll be decomposing into phosphorous, calcium, and so on. Who else will you find to tell you the truth? All that's left are the archives. Pieces of paper. And the truth is... I worked at an archive myself, I can tell you first hand: paper lies even more than people do.
Svetlana Alexievich
#9. And yet we went on being surprised that they didn't love us. They'd come to our hospitals. We'd give a woman some medicine but she wouldn't look at us, and certainly never give us a smile.
Svetlana Alexievich
#10. A soldier must be like a bullet, constantly ready to be fired.' I learnt that by heart. You go to war in order to kill. Killing is my profession - that's what I was trained to do.
Svetlana Alexievich
#11. Russian can't convince another Russian of anything without obscenities. I
Svetlana Alexievich
#12. People aren't heroes. We're all - peddlers of the apocalypse. Big and small. I have these images in my mind, these pictures.
Svetlana Alexievich
#13. records the lives of ideas. People don't write it, time does. Human truth is just a nail that everybody hangs their hats on.
Svetlana Alexievich
#14. The soul will fly home of its own accord, but shipping a coffin is pretty expensive.
Svetlana Alexievich
#16. Back then everyone was saying: "We're going to die, we're going to die. By the year 2000, there won't be any Belarussians left.
Svetlana Alexievich
#17. I know full well what it means to dream. My whole childhood, I begged for a bicycle, and I never did get one.
Svetlana Alexievich
#18. Our people need freedom like a monkey needs glasses. No one would know what to do with it.
Svetlana Alexievich
#19. People are constantly forced to choose between having freedom and having success and stability; freedom with suffering or happiness without freedom. The majority choose the latter.
Svetlana Alexievich
#20. remember my father's words: "It's possible to survive the camps, but you can't survive other people." He
Svetlana Alexievich
#21. I accepted the official line so completely that even now, after all I've read and heard, I still have a minute hope that our lives weren't entirely wasted. It's the self-preservation instinct at work.
Svetlana Alexievich
#22. Well, I admit it. I had the greatest respect for the Afghan people, even while I was shooting and killing them. I still do. You could even say I love them. I like their songs and prayers, as peaceful and timeless as their mountains.
Svetlana Alexievich
#23. How can we preserve our planet on which little girls are supposed to sleep in their beds, and not lie dead on the road with unplaited pigtails? And so that childhood would never again be called war-time childhood.
Svetlana Alexievich
#24. What would I have been if not for perestroika? An engineer with a pathetic salary.
Svetlana Alexievich
#25. According to Abkhazian custom, the time you spend with guests around the table doesn't count toward your lifespan because you're drinking wine and enjoying yourself.
Svetlana Alexievich
#26. How were you taken prisoner?' The interrogator asked my father. 'The Finns pulled me out of a lake.' 'You traitor! You were saving your own skin instead of the Motherland.' My father also considered himself guilty. That's how they'd been trained.
Svetlana Alexievich
#27. So...Well...Life went by...The only thing money can't buy is time. Weep before God or not, you can't buy it. That's just the way it is.
Svetlana Alexievich
#28. A bottle of vodka costs as much as a coat used to. And something to snack on? Half a kilo of salami is half a month's pension.
Svetlana Alexievich
#29. Death is the fairest thing in the world. No one's ever gotten out of it. The earth takes everyone - the kind, the cruel, the sinners. Aside from that, there's no fairness on earth.
Svetlana Alexievich
#30. These people had already seen what for everyone else is still unknown. I felt like I was recording the future. Svetlana
Svetlana Alexievich
#31. Instead of a Motherland, we live in a huge supermarket. If this is freedom, I don't need it. To hell with it!
Svetlana Alexievich
#32. Everyone thought of themselves as a victim, never a willing accomplice. One
Svetlana Alexievich
#33. can do without a lot of things, the only thing I can't do without is the past. [
Svetlana Alexievich
#34. When you're part of a mob, the mob is a monster. A person in a mob is nothing like the person you sit and chat with in the kitchen. Drinking
Svetlana Alexievich
#35. I'm afraid of freedom, it feels like some drunk guy could show up and burn my dacha at any moment.
Svetlana Alexievich
#36. People always want to live, even during wartime. You'll learn a lot from living through a war...There is no beast worse than man.
Svetlana Alexievich
#38. truths. History is concerned solely with the facts; emotions are outside of its realm of interest. In fact, it's considered improper to admit feelings into history. But I look at the world as a writer and not a historian. I am fascinated by people.
Svetlana Alexievich
#39. Where are we going to get tens of thousands of dollars if my husband makes 120 dollars a month? One professor told us quietly: "With her pathologies, your child is of great interest to science. You should write to hospitals in other countries. They should be interested.
Svetlana Alexievich
#40. According to Darwin's theory, it's not the strongest who survive, but those who are the best adapted to their environment. Average people are the ones who survive and carry on the human race.
Svetlana Alexievich
#41. Chernobyl is a theme worthy of Dostoevsky, an attempt to justify mankind.
Svetlana Alexievich
#44. The only righteous thing on the face of the earth is death. No one has ever bribed their way out of that. The earth takes us all: the good, the evil and the sinners. And that's all the justice you'll find in this world.
Svetlana Alexievich
#45. The most important thing is spiritual labor...Books...You can wear the same suit for twenty years, two coats are enough for a lifetime, but you can't live without Pushkin or the complete works of Gorky.
Svetlana Alexievich
#46. Why is it that seventeenand eighteen-year-olds find it easier to kill than thirty-year-olds, for example? Because they have no pity, that's why.
Svetlana Alexievich
#48. They were told they were on a holy mission and that their country would remember them. Now people turn away and try to forget the war, especially those who sent us there in the first place.
Svetlana Alexievich
#49. isn't a hair, you can't just pull it out. And no ritual can make it stick. Why cry over it? Who
Svetlana Alexievich
#50. still remember the way a twenty-year-old shouted, 'I don't want to hear about any political mistakes! I just don't want to! Give me my two legs back if it was all a mistake.
Svetlana Alexievich
#51. Fear is more human than bravery, you're scared and you're sorry, at least for yourself, but you force your fear back into your subconscious.
Svetlana Alexievich
#52. repentance, the response would be, "What do I have to repent for?" Everyone thought of
Svetlana Alexievich
#54. After I got back I couldn't bear to wear my 'pre-war' jeans and shirts. They belonged to some stranger, although they still smelt of me, as my mother assured me. That stranger no longer exists.
Svetlana Alexievich
#55. They die, but no one's really asked us. No one's asked what we've been through. What we saw. No one wants to hear about death. About what scares them. But I was telling you about love. About my love . . . Lyudmilla
Svetlana Alexievich
#56. That's how it was in the beginning. We didn't just lose a town, we lost our whole lives.
Svetlana Alexievich
#57. Chernobyl is like the war of all wars. There's nowhere to hide. Not underground, not underwater, not in the air.
Svetlana Alexievich
#58. We were told that we had to win. Against whom? The atom? Physics? The universe? Victory is not an event for us, but a process.
Svetlana Alexievich
#59. When I see a garden in flower, then I believe in God for a second. But not the rest of the time
Svetlana Alexievich
#60. One of the poets says somewhere that animals are a different people. I killed them by the ten, by the hundred, thousand, not even knowing what they were called. I destroyed their houses, their secrets. And buried them. Buried them. Leonid
Svetlana Alexievich
#61. I remembered some lines from the papers: our nuclear stations are absolutely safe, we could build one on Red Square, they're safer than samovars. They're like stars and we'll "light" the whole earth with them.
Svetlana Alexievich
#62. They, our parents, lived through a great catastrophe, and we needed to live through it, too. Otherwise we'd never become real people. That's how we're made. If we just work each day and eat well - that would be strange and intolerable! We
Svetlana Alexievich
#63. Question: Is the world as it's depicted in words the real world? Words stand between the person and his soul. And
Svetlana Alexievich
#64. No one knows what's in the other world. It's better here. More familiar.
Svetlana Alexievich
#66. Twice a week we attended a political 'seminar', where we were continually told that we were doing our sacred duty to help make the border totally secure.
Svetlana Alexievich
#67. Chernobyl, while an accident in the sense that no one intentionally set it off, was also the deliberate product of a culture of cronyism, laziness, and a deep-seated indifference toward the general population.
Svetlana Alexievich
#68. We're going to die, we're going to die. By the year 2000, there won't be any Belarussians left." My daughter was six years old. I'm putting her to bed, and she whispers in my ear: "Daddy, I want to live, I'm still little." And I had thought she didn't understand anything. Can
Svetlana Alexievich
#69. It turned out the officer was escorting the soldier home. He'd gone mad: 'He's been digging ever since we left Kabul.
Svetlana Alexievich
#70. Come get your apples! Chernobyl apples!' Someone told her not to advertise that, no one will buy them. 'Don't worry!' she says. 'They buy them anyway. Some need them for their mother-in-law, some for their boss.
Svetlana Alexievich
#71. People ask me: "Why don't you take photos in color? In color!" But Chernobyl: literally it means black event. There are no other colors there.
Svetlana Alexievich
#72. Seventy-plus years in the Marxist-Leninist laboratory gave rise to a new man: Homo sovieticus. Some see
Svetlana Alexievich
#73. We don't need anything. Just listen to us and try to understand. Society is good at doing things, 'giving' medical help, pensions, flats. But all this so-called giving has been paid for in very expensive currency. Our blood.
Svetlana Alexievich
#74. At first, the question was, Who's to blame? But then, when we learned more, we started thinking, What should we do?
Svetlana Alexievich
#75. The doctors said that I got sick because my father worked at Chernobyl. And after that I was born. I love my father.
Svetlana Alexievich
#76. My life has always been like a change jar. It's full, then it's empty, then it's full again, then it's empty again.
Svetlana Alexievich
#77. Yur Karyakin once wrote: 'We should not judge a man's life by his perception of himself. Such a perception may be tragically inadequate.' And I read something in Kafka to the effect that man was irretrievably lost within himself.
Svetlana Alexievich
#78. At that time my notions of nuclear power were utterly idyllic. At school and at the university we'd been taught that this was a magical factory that made "energy out of nothing," where people in white robes sat and pushed buttons. Chernobyl blew up when we weren't prepared.
Svetlana Alexievich
#79. The mysterious Russian soul... Everyone wants to understand it. They read Dostoevsky: what's behind that soul of theirs? Well, behind our soul there's just more soul.
Svetlana Alexievich
#80. Any little knot, that was already a wound on him. I clipped my nails down till they bled so I wouldn't accidentally cut him. None of the nurses could approach him; if they needed anything they'd call me. And
Svetlana Alexievich
#81. Instead of lullabies, my mother would sing us songs of the Revolution. Now she sings them to her grandchildren. 'Are you nuts?' I ask her. She replies, 'I don't know any other songs.
Svetlana Alexievich
#82. You're young. Why are you doing this? That's not a person anymore, that's a nuclear reactor. You'll just burn together." I was like a dog, running after them. I'd stand for hours at their doors, begging and pleading. And then they'd say: "All right! The hell with you! You're not normal!
Svetlana Alexievich
#83. Show me a fantasy novel about Chernobyl--there isn't one! Because reality is more fantastic.
Svetlana Alexievich
#85. I want to bear witness: my daughter died from Chernobyl. And they want us to forget about it. Nikolai Fomich Kalugin, father
Svetlana Alexievich
#86. No one had taught us what freedom means. We'd only ever learned how to die for freedom.
Svetlana Alexievich
#87. I don't like the word "hero." There are no heroes in war. As soon as someone picks up a weapon, they can no longer be good. They won't be able to.
Svetlana Alexievich
#88. They call the souls down from heaven. Those who had people die this year cry, and those whose people died earlier, don't. They talk, they remember. Everyone prays. And those who don't know how to pray, also pray.
Svetlana Alexievich
#89. There's something immoral, voyeuristic, about peering too closely at a person's courage in the face of danger.
Svetlana Alexievich
#90. You're all like black boxes here," he said. He meant the black boxes that record information on airplanes. We think that we're living, talking, walking, eating. Loving one another. But we're just recording information!
Svetlana Alexievich
#92. At first we were all turned into animals. The very word "Chernobyl" is like a signal. Everyone turns their head to look at you. He's from there! That
Svetlana Alexievich
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