Top 160 Svetlana Alexievich Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “You can talk to the dead just like you can talk to the living. Makes no difference to me. I can hear the one and the other. When you’re alone... And when you’re sad. When you’re very sad.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

2. “In “The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor,” Dostoevsky stages a debate about freedom. Namely, about the struggle, torment, and tragedy of freedom: “What’s the point of delving into that damn good and evil when the cost is so high?” 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

3. “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

4. “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

5. “Chernobyl is like the war of all wars. There’s nowhere to hide. Not underground, not underwater, not in the air.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

6. “Yo tengo miedo. Tengo miedo de una cosa, de que en nuestra vida el miedo ocupe el lugar del amor.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

7. “I write not about war, but about human beings in war. I write not the history of a war, but the history of feelings. I am a historian of the soul.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

8. “The sarcophagus is a corpse which still has breath. It is breathing death. How much longer does it have? Nobody really knows: it remains impossible to access many of the structural components to assess their soundness. What everybody does know is that, should the Shelter Object fail, it would unleash consequences even more devastating than in 1986.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

9. “I want to bear witness: my daughter died from Chernobyl. And they want us to forget about it. Nikolai Fomich Kalugin, father.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

10. “What would I have been if not for perestroika? An engineer with a pathetic salary.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

11. “A bullet is alone, and man is alone; a bullet flies wherever it likes, and fate twists a man however it likes.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

12. “Everyone thought of themselves as a victim, never a willing accomplice. One.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

13. “Victory is not an event for us, but a process. Life is a struggle. An overcoming. That’s why we have this love of floods and fires and other catastrophes. We need an opportunity to demonstrate our “courage and heroism.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

14. “Our feelings are like some sort of separate entities-suffering, love, tenderness. They have lives of their own, they don’t depende on us. For some unknown reason, you suddenly choose one person over another, even though the other one might be better. Or without even realizing it, you’re suddenly part of another persons life. You don’t know it yet, but they’ve already found you. They’ve sent out their signal.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

15. “That’s how it was in the beginning. We didn’t just lose a town, we lost our whole lives.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

16. “People came from all around on their cars and their bikes to have a look. We didn’t know that death could be so beautiful.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

17. “I believe that in each of us there is a small piece of history. In one half a page, in another two or three. Together we write the book of time. We each call out our own truth. The nightmare of nuances.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

18. “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

19. “No one understands a stranger’s tragedy, God willing you might understand your own.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

20. “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

21. “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!”

— Svetlana Alexievich

22. “Man lives with death, but he doesn’t understand what it is.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

23. “As my physics teacher always said, “My dear students! Just remember that money solves all problems, even differential equations.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

24. “I’m not afraid of God. I’m afraid of man.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

25. “The mechanism of evil will work under conditions of apocalypse, also. That’s what I understood. Man will gossip, and kiss up to the bosses, and save his television and ugly fur coat. And people will be the same until the end of time. Always.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

26. “We were told that this was a just war, that we were helping the Afghan people to put an end to feudalism and build a wonderful socialist society.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

27. “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

28. “Even if it’s poisoned with radiation, it’s still my home. There’s no place else they need us. Even a bird loves its nest.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

29. “In five years, everything can change in Russia, but in two hundred – nothing. Boundless.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

30. “Today, it’s shameful being poor and unathletic-it’s a sign that you’re not making it.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

31. “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

32. “I’m a product of my time. I’m not a criminal.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

33. “We hasten to forget, to wipe away the traces, because preserved facts can become evidence, often at the cost of life. No one knows anything further back than their grandparents; no one looks for their roots. They made history, but live for the day. On short memory.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

34. “Someone sang a rhyme at a wedding, “We should thank Stalin, our brother, he put all our feet in rubber.” That was enough. On one hand, the system was butchering people, but on the other hand, the people didn’t show one another much mercy, either.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

35. “In the winter, an old man hung up a calf’s carcase he’d cut up in the yard. Just then, they came along with some foreigners. ‘What are you doing, old man?’ ‘Letting the radiation out.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

36. “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

37. “For a child, the loss of a parent is the loss of memory itself.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

38. “Do you know that it can be a sin to give birth? I’d never heard those words before. Katya.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

39. “That’s where perestroika really took place. 1960s dissident life is the kitchen life. Thanks, Khrushchev! He’s the one who led us out of the communal apartments; under his rule, we got our own private kitchens where we could criticize the government and, most importantly, not be afraid, because in the kitchen you were always among friends. It.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

40. “If anyone got indignant and wanted to take the coffin back home, they were told that the dead were now, you know, heroes, and that they no longer belonged to their families. They were heroes of the State. They belonged to the State. We.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

41. “Is there anything more frightening than people?”

— Svetlana Alexievich

42. “No se hallaban palabras para unos sentimientos nuevos y no se encontraban los sentimientos adecuados para las nuevas palabras;.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

43. “No one listened to us! No one listened to the scientists and the doctors. They pulled science and medicine into politics. Of course they did!”

— Svetlana Alexievich

44. “We discussed how our lives were only beginning. There was joy and fear. Before we had been afraid of death, and now – of life... It was equally frightening.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

45. “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

46. “No one had taught us how to be free. We had only ever been taught how to die for freedom.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

47. “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

48. “We believed that salami was spontaneously generated by freedom.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

49. “Evil is not an actual substance. It is the absence of good, in the way that darkness is simply the absence of light.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

50. “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