Top 100 Svetlana Quotes
#1. These people had already seen what for everyone else is still unknown. I felt like I was recording the future. Svetlana
Svetlana Alexievich
#2. Whenever I'm worried about anything," said this guy Ben, "I like to think about China. China has a population of like two billion people, and not one of them even remotely cares about whatever you think is so important." I acknowledged that this was a great comfort. Svetlana
Elif Batuman
#3. 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
#4. A sense of religion is something one is born with, like a musical ear. One can develop it, cultivate it, enrich it, but if one hasn't got its seed to begin with, no powers of the intellect, no sophistication of 'evidence' can awaken it.
Svetlana Alliluyeva
#6. It became clear to the whole world that a totalitarian regime could neither accuse nor transform itself: suicide was not in its nature, it could only kill others.
Svetlana Alliluyeva
#7. If they're friends, then they've got your back . . . whether you're there or not. Friends won't "forget" about you.
Svetlana Chmakova
#9. Ballet is not just my profession, it is my life ... It is horrible for me to think that one day it will all finish.
Svetlana Zakharova
#10. 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
#11. Everything on our tormented earth that is alive and breathes, that blossoms and bears fruit, lives only by virtue of and in the name of Truth and Good.
Svetlana Alliluyeva
#12. 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
#13. I want success. I want to do something. I really want people to remember my name.
Svetlana Kuznetsova
#14. Religion means a binding. If a man does not feel himself a part of the Universe, and does not hear its pulse, he is not religious. But once he has heard that pulse, he will be hearing it always. Every day his life will replenish itself from this inexhaustible source, eternal and powerful as the sun.
Svetlana Alliluyeva
#15. 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
#17. What do you think of all this? Am I a friend or foe - or a little of each? Are the important things black and white, or maybe a little gray?
Svetlana Chmakova
#19. Chernobyl is a theme worthy of Dostoevsky, an attempt to justify mankind.
Svetlana Alexievich
#20. 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
#21. By continually increasing the difficulty of the sport, we are discouraging younger athletes from starting and continuing in the sport. But most importantly, we are losing the beauty of our sport. We do not want gymnastics to lose what makes it so great - its artistic beauty.
Svetlana Boginskaya
#22. The melody of a religious feeling is the music of life itself. To those who do not hear it I could not explain what it sounds like ... If the spark isn't smoldering somewhere inside one, no efforts can ever bring it into existence. Water cannot catch fire.
Svetlana Alliluyeva
#23. 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
#24. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. That's how it was in the beginning. We didn't just lose a town, we lost our whole lives.
Svetlana Alexievich
#29. The cool enchantment of evening has arrived after the prostrating heat of summer's day and we lie quietly in anticipation of Your luminous appearance - Mysterious Selene, Whose Lunar Orb relieves the dark of night.
Lady Svetlana
#31. Moscow, breathing fire like a human volcano with its smouldering lava of passion, ambition and politics, its hurly-burly of meetings and entertainment ... Moscow seethes and bubbles and gasps for air. It's always thirsting for something new ...
Svetlana Alliluyeva
#32. No one knows what's in the other world. It's better here. More familiar.
Svetlana Alexievich
#33. Question: Is the world as it's depicted in words the real world? Words stand between the person and his soul. And
Svetlana Alexievich
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. When I see a garden in flower, then I believe in God for a second. But not the rest of the time
Svetlana Alexievich
#38. 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
#39. Chernobyl is like the war of all wars. There's nowhere to hide. Not underground, not underwater, not in the air.
Svetlana Alexievich
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#45. I knew well in advance even before I stepped on the stage for my first event that I was going to lose.
Svetlana Khorkina
#46. The nostalgic is never a native but a displaced person who mediates between the local and the universal.
Svetlana Boym
#47. repentance, the response would be, "What do I have to repent for?" Everyone thought of
Svetlana Alexievich
#48. Sometimes you may even have a stunt double do certain things for you, but when it's close-up and it's really dramatic, that's when you really need to concentrate. You cannot get body doubles or anybody else to do it for you.
Svetlana Khodchenkova
#49. 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
#51. 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
#53. It should be judged primarily on grace, elegance and beauty rather than simply on mechanic tumbling.
Svetlana Khorkina
#55. 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
#57. The soul will fly home of its own accord, but shipping a coffin is pretty expensive.
Svetlana Alexievich
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. Russian can't convince another Russian of anything without obscenities. I
Svetlana Alexievich
#61. The one good thing about not seeing you is that I can write you letters.
Svetlana Alliluyeva
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#67. 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
#68. Do you know that it can be a sin to give birth? I'd never heard those words before. Katya
Svetlana Alexievich
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. Being from Russia, I respect all of the comic books American people love. We do follow it a lot.
Svetlana Khodchenkova
#73. Moscow seethes and bubbles and gasps for air. It's always thirsting for something new, the newest events, the latest sensation. Everyone wants to be the first to know. It's the rhythm of life today.
Svetlana Alliluyeva
#75. Hard work is always hard work, for young gymnasts and old gymnasts. Whoever can handle this will be a champion.
Svetlana Boginskaya
#76. 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
#78. 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
#80. can do without a lot of things, the only thing I can't do without is the past. [
Svetlana Alexievich
#81. I like old people, just as I like old trees: in their shadow there is freshness and peace, one admires them, and around them everything is so calm.
Svetlana Alliluyeva
#82. Everyone thought of themselves as a victim, never a willing accomplice. One
Svetlana Alexievich
#83. 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
#84. I realize how much ballet gave me, and because of ballet, I'm known as a graceful gymnast.
Svetlana Boginskaya
#86. 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
#87. All right, let's consider some history here. I see a number of girls are wearing pants. This used to be frowned upon. In 1938, Helen Hulick was jailed for wearing slacks -- put behind bars.
Do you think society should have the right to jail or punish you for what you choose to wear?
Svetlana Chmakova
#88. 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
#89. I'm afraid of freedom, it feels like some drunk guy could show up and burn my dacha at any moment.
Svetlana Alexievich
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. What would I have been if not for perestroika? An engineer with a pathetic salary.
Svetlana Alexievich
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. remember my father's words: "It's possible to survive the camps, but you can't survive other people." He
Svetlana Alexievich
#98. 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
#99. Goddess of immemorable cloudy veils, reveal your magickal powers so we may re-attune our psyches to your multi-dimensional realities and thereby draw your power to heal this worldly habitat and return it to the provocative Sisterhood of Your Milky Way.
Lady Svetlana
#100. Our people need freedom like a monkey needs glasses. No one would know what to do with it.
Svetlana Alexievich
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