Svetlana Alexievich Quotes
Collection of top 53 famous quotes about Svetlana Alexievich
Svetlana Alexievich Quotes & Sayings
Happy to read and share the best inspirational Svetlana Alexievich quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.
We share a communist collective memory. We're neighbors in memory.
— Svetlana Alexievich
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
Show me a fantasy novel about Chernobyl--there isn't one! Because reality is more fantastic.
— Svetlana Alexievich
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
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
Do you know that it can be a sin to give birth? I'd never heard those words before. Katya
— Svetlana Alexievich
Our people need freedom like a monkey needs glasses. No one would know what to do with it.
— Svetlana Alexievich
Seventy-plus years in the Marxist-Leninist laboratory gave rise to a new man: Homo sovieticus. Some see
— Svetlana Alexievich
I'm not afraid of God. I'm afraid of man.
— Svetlana Alexievich
Russian novels don't teach you how to become successful.
— Svetlana Alexievich
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
Man lives with death, but he doesn't understand what it is.
— Svetlana Alexievich
I'm a product of my time. I'm not a criminal.
— Svetlana Alexievich
Chernobyl is a theme worthy of Dostoevsky, an attempt to justify mankind.
— Svetlana Alexievich
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
The soul will fly home of its own accord, but shipping a coffin is pretty expensive.
— Svetlana Alexievich
What would I have been if not for perestroika? An engineer with a pathetic salary.
— Svetlana Alexievich
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
Question: Is the world as it's depicted in words the real world? Words stand between the person and his soul. And
— Svetlana Alexievich
There's something immoral, voyeuristic, about peering too closely at a person's courage in the face of danger.
— Svetlana Alexievich
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
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
Russian can't convince another Russian of anything without obscenities. I
— Svetlana Alexievich
can do without a lot of things, the only thing I can't do without is the past. [
— Svetlana Alexievich
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
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
No one had taught us what freedom means. We'd only ever learned how to die for freedom.
— Svetlana Alexievich
Is there anything more frightening than people?
— Svetlana Alexievich
Humanities" started sounding like a disease
— Svetlana Alexievich
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
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
I want to bear witness: my daughter died from Chernobyl. And they want us to forget about it. Nikolai Fomich Kalugin, father
— Svetlana Alexievich
These people had already seen what for everyone else is still unknown. I felt like I was recording the future. Svetlana
— Svetlana Alexievich
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
remember my father's words: "It's possible to survive the camps, but you can't survive other people." He
— Svetlana Alexievich
Everyone thought of themselves as a victim, never a willing accomplice. One
— Svetlana Alexievich
For our entire history, we'd been surviving instead of living. Today,
— Svetlana Alexievich
Truth is communal.
— Svetlana Alexievich
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
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
repentance, the response would be, "What do I have to repent for?" Everyone thought of
— Svetlana Alexievich
you can survive without bread, but without love you're dead
— Svetlana Alexievich
At first, the question was, Who's to blame? But then, when we learned more, we started thinking, What should we do?
— Svetlana Alexievich
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
When I see a garden in flower, then I believe in God for a second. But not the rest of the time
— Svetlana Alexievich
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
I'm afraid of freedom, it feels like some drunk guy could show up and burn my dacha at any moment.
— Svetlana Alexievich
That's how it was in the beginning. We didn't just lose a town, we lost our whole lives.
— Svetlana Alexievich
Chernobyl is like the war of all wars. There's nowhere to hide. Not underground, not underwater, not in the air.
— Svetlana Alexievich
No one knows what's in the other world. It's better here. More familiar.
— Svetlana Alexievich
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
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
We'll die, and then we'll become science,
— Svetlana Alexievich