Famous Quotes & Sayings

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Svetlana Alexievich.

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Famous Quotes By Svetlana Alexievich

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 576295

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

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 2271669

We were expecting our first child. My husband wanted a boy and I wanted a girl. The doctors tried to convince me: "You need to get an abortion. Your husband was at Chernobyl." He was a truck driver; they called him in during the first days. He drove sand. But I didn't believe anyone. The baby was born dead. She was missing two fingers. A girl. I cried. "She should at least have fingers," I thought. "She's a girl. — Svetlana Alexievich

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No one knows what's in the other world. It's better here. More familiar. — Svetlana Alexievich

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 821811

We've worshipped many gods. Some have been consigned to the scrapheap, others to museums. Let us make Truth into a god! A god before whom each of us shall answer according to his own conscience, and not as a class, or a university year, or a collective, or a people... Let us be charitable to those who have paid a greater price for insight than we ourselves. Remember: 'I brought my friend, and my own truth, back with me from a raid.. Head, arms and legs, all severed, and his skin flayed... — Svetlana Alexievich

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 1485027

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

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 1774003

Somebody betrayed us... The Germans learned the location of our partisan troop. They surrounded the forest from all sides. We were hiding in the deep woods, hiding in the swamps where the torturers did not go [...] A radio operator was with us. She gave birth recently. The baby was hungry... Wanting the breast... But the mother is starving, she has no milk, and the baby is crying. The Germans are nearby... With dogs... If the dogs hear the baby, we're all dead. All of us - thirty people... Do you understand? We make a decision... Nobody dares to tell her the commader's order, but the mother guesses it herself. She puts the bundle with the baby into the water and holds it there for a long time... The baby does not cry... Not a sound... And we cannot lift our eyes. We cannot look at the mother or at each other — Svetlana Alexievich

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 321020

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

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 1701778

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

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 2165677

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

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 505399

I'm afraid of freedom, it feels like some drunk guy could show up and burn my dacha at any moment. — Svetlana Alexievich

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 1862008

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

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 870452

That's how it was in the beginning. We didn't just lose a town, we lost our whole lives. — Svetlana Alexievich

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 385909

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

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 2183096

They weren't maniacs, and they weren't criminals. They were just ordinary workers at a nuclear power plant. Chernobyl opened an abyss, something beyond Kolyma, Auschwitz, the Holocaust. A person with an axe and a bow, or a person with a grenade launcher and gas chambers, can't kill everyone. But with an atom... — Svetlana Alexievich

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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

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 124843

Question: Is the world as it's depicted in words the real world? Words stand between the person and his soul. And — Svetlana Alexievich

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 1806987

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

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 1454677

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

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At first, the question was, Who's to blame? But then, when we learned more, we started thinking, What should we do? — Svetlana Alexievich

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 1378803

When I see a garden in flower, then I believe in God for a second. But not the rest of the time — Svetlana Alexievich

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 1186209

There you are: a normal person. A little person. You're just like everyone else - you go to work, you return from work. You get an average salary. Once a year you go on vacation. You're a normal person! And then one day you're suddenly turned into a Chernobyl person. Into an animal, something that everyone's interested in, and that no one knows anything about. — Svetlana Alexievich

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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

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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

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 1768833

Man lives with death, but he doesn't understand what it is. — Svetlana Alexievich

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Do you know that it can be a sin to give birth? I'd never heard those words before. Katya — Svetlana Alexievich

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 1176197

We'll die, and then we'll become science, — Svetlana Alexievich

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 1695676

There's a fragment of some conversation, I'm remembering it. Someone is saying: "You have to understand: this is not your husband anymore, not a beloved person, but a radioactive object with a strong density of poisoning. You're not suicidal. Get ahold of yourself." And I'm like someone who's lost her mind: "But I love him! I love him!" He's sleeping, and I'm whispering: "I love you!" Walking in the hospital courtyard, "I love you." Carrying his sanitary tray, "I love you. — Svetlana Alexievich

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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

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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

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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

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I want to bear witness: my daughter died from Chernobyl. And they want us to forget about it. Nikolai Fomich Kalugin, father — Svetlana Alexievich

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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

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 2182150

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

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 1356671

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

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 2167458

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

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 2091887

I told you. There's nothing heroic here, nothing for the writer's pen. I had thoughts like, It's not wartime, why should I have to risk myself while someone else is sleeping with my wife? Why me again, and not him? To be honest, I didn't see any heroes there. I saw nutcases, who didn't care about their own lives, and I had enough craziness myself, but it wasn't necessary. I also have medals and awards - but that's because I wasn't afraid of dying. I didn't care! It was even something of an out. They'd have buried me with honors. And the government would have paid for it. — Svetlana Alexievich

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For our entire history, we'd been surviving instead of living. Today, — Svetlana Alexievich

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People who've come out of socialism are both like and unlike the rest of humanity - we have our own lexicon, our own conceptions of good and evil, our heroes, our martyrs. We have a special relationship with death. The stories people tell me are full of jarring terms: "shoot," "execute," "liquidate," "eliminate," or typically Soviet varieties of disappearance such as "arrest," "ten years without the right of correspondence,"*2 and "emigration." How — Svetlana Alexievich

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 1379986

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

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Humanities" started sounding like a disease — Svetlana Alexievich

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 1414492

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

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 1419117

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

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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

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 2000738

I asked everyone I met what 'freedom' meant. Fathers and children had very different answers. Those who were born in the USSR and those born after its collapse do not share a common experience - it's like they're from different planets. For the fathers, freedom is the absence of fear;[...] For the children: freedom is love; inner freedom is an absolute value. Freedom is when you're not afraid of your own desires; — Svetlana Alexievich

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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

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Truth is communal. — Svetlana Alexievich

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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

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 1910687

Russian can't convince another Russian of anything without obscenities. I — Svetlana Alexievich

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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

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 1897286

We're often silent. We don't yell and we don't complain. We're patient, as always. Because we don't have the words yet. We're afraid to talk about it. We don't know how. It's not an ordinary experience, and the questions it raises are not ordinary. The world has been split in two: there's us, the Chernobylites, and then there's you, the others. Have you noticed? No one here points out that they're Russian or Belarussian or Ukrainian. We all call ourselves Chernobylites. "We're from Chernobyl." "I'm a Chernobylite." As if this is a separate people. A new nation. — Svetlana Alexievich

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 1592255

To take just two examples: in the hope of obscuring the true impact of the war, some local authorities refused to allow special areas in cemeteries to be set apart for the graves of soldiers killed in Afghanistan; while others forbade the cause and place of death to be stated on gravestones or memorial shields. — Svetlana Alexievich

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 1875058

You're going to say that you're a tractor specialist," I said to Slyunkov, he'd been a director of a tractor factory, "and that you didn't understand what radiation could do, but I'm a physicist, I know what the consequences are." But from his point of view, what was this? Some professor, a bunch of physicists, were going to tell the Central Committee what to do? No, they weren't a gang of criminals. It was more like a conspiracy of ignorance and obedience. — Svetlana Alexievich

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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

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 1665020

People who've been through that kind of humiliation together, or who've seen what people can be like, at the bottom, run from one another. There's something I felt in Chernobyl, something I understood that I don't really want to talk about. About the fact, for example, that all our humanistic ideas are relative. In an extreme situation, people don't behave the way you read about in books. Sooner the other way around. People aren't heroes."--Sergei Gurin — Svetlana Alexievich

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 1665089

I'm a product of my time. I'm not a criminal. — Svetlana Alexievich

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remember my father's words: "It's possible to survive the camps, but you can't survive other people." He — Svetlana Alexievich

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 1166818

There's a note on the door: "Dear kind person, Please don't look for valuables here. We never had any. Use whatever you want, but don't trash the place. We'll be back." I saw signs on other houses in different colors - "Dear house, forgive us!" People said goodbye to their homes like they were people. Or they'd written: "we're leaving in the morning," or, "we're leaving at night," and they'd put the date and even the time. There were notes written on school notebook paper: "Don't beat the cat. Otherwise the rats will eat everything." And then in a child's handwriting: "Don't kill our Zhulka. She's a good cat." [Closes his eyes.] — Svetlana Alexievich

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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

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you can survive without bread, but without love you're dead — Svetlana Alexievich

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Everyone thought of themselves as a victim, never a willing accomplice. One — Svetlana Alexievich

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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

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 518400

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

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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

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 466636

I often thought that the simples 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. The development of these feelings, the spilling of these feelings past the facts, is what fascinantes me. I try to find them, collect them, protect them. — Svetlana Alexievich

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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

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 405463

He's going to die." I understood later on that you can't think that way. I cried in the bathroom. None of the mothers cry in the hospital rooms. They cry in the toilets, the baths. I come back cheerful: "Your cheeks are red. You're getting better." "Mom, take me out of the hospital. I'm going to die here. Everyone here dies." Now where am I going to cry? In the bathroom? There's a line for the bathroom - everyone like me is in that line. — Svetlana Alexievich

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 382137

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

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 341365

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

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 682369

There are many of us here. A whole street. That's what it's called--Chernobylskaya. These people worked at the station their whole lives. A lot of them still go there to work on a provisional basis, that's how they work there now, no one lives there anymore. They have bad diseases, they're invalids, but they don't leave their jobs, they're scared to even think of the reactor closing down. Who needs them now anywhere else? Often they die. In an instant. They just drop--someone will be walking, he falls down, goes to sleep, never wakes up. He was carrying flowers for his nurse and his heart stopped. 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...

-- Lyudmila, Ignatenko,
wife of deceased fireman, Vasily Ignatenko — Svetlana Alexievich

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 331507

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

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 290903

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

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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

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 258357

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

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repentance, the response would be, "What do I have to repent for?" Everyone thought of — Svetlana Alexievich

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 242783

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

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Chernobyl is a theme worthy of Dostoevsky, an attempt to justify mankind. — Svetlana Alexievich

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 207201

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

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 159995

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

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 100765

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

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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

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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

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Reality has always attracted me like a magnet, tortured and hypnotized me, and I wanted to capture it on paper. So I immediately appropriated this genre of actual human voices and confessions, witness evidences and documents. This is how I hear and see the world - as a chorus of individual voices and a collage of everyday details. In this way all my mental and emotional potential is realized to the full. In this way I can be simultaneously a writer, reporter, sociologist, psychologist and preacher. — Svetlana Alexievich

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Show me a fantasy novel about Chernobyl--there isn't one! Because reality is more fantastic. — Svetlana Alexievich

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 1185576

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

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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

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Russian novels don't teach you how to become successful. — Svetlana Alexievich

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 1153752

But I'm never lonely, a man who believes can never be lonely. I ride around the villages - I used to find spaghetti, flour - even vegetable oil. Canned fruit. Now I go to the cemeteries - people leave food and drink for the dead. But the dead don't need it. They don't mind. In the fields there's wild grain, and in the forest there are mushrooms and berries. Freedom is here. I — Svetlana Alexievich

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 1140674

These people had already seen what for everyone else is still unknown. I felt like I was recording the future. Svetlana — Svetlana Alexievich

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My husband, a man with a university degree, an engineer, seriously tried to convince me that it was an act of terrorism. An enemy diversion. A lot of people at the time thought that. But I remembered how I'd once been on a train with a man who worked in construction who told me about the building of the Smolensk nuclear plant: how much cement, boards, nails, and sand was stolen from the construction site and sold to neighboring villages. In exchange for money, for a bottle of vodka. People — Svetlana Alexievich

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There's something immoral, voyeuristic, about peering too closely at a person's courage in the face of danger. — Svetlana Alexievich

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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

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Seventy-plus years in the Marxist-Leninist laboratory gave rise to a new man: Homo sovieticus. Some see — Svetlana Alexievich

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 948349

During the war, one out of every four Belarussians was killed; today, one out of every five Belarussians lives on contaminated land. This amounts to 2.1 million people, of whom 700,000 are children. Among the demographic factors responsible for the depopulation of Belarus, radiation is number one. In the Gomel and Mogilev regions, which suffered the most from Chernobyl, mortality rates exceed birth rates by 20%. As — Svetlana Alexievich

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 943357

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

Svetlana Alexievich Quotes 904965

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

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The commentator says: The West is trying to spread panic, telling lies about the accident. And then they show the dosimeter again, measuring some fish on a plate, or a chocolate bar, or some pancakes at an open pancake stand. It was all a lie. The military dosimeters then in use by our armed forces were designed to measure the radioactive background, not individual products. This level of lying, this incredible level, with which Chernobyl is connected in our minds, was comparable only to the level of lies during the big war. — Svetlana Alexievich

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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

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We still have our television and our books, our imagination. Children grow up in their houses, without the forest and the river. They can only look at them. These are completely different children. And I go to them and recite Pushkin, who I thought was eternal. And then I have this terrible thought: what if our entire culture is just an old trunk with a bunch of stale manuscripts? Everything I love . . . He: — Svetlana Alexievich

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The soul will fly home of its own accord, but shipping a coffin is pretty expensive. — Svetlana Alexievich

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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