Top 180 Svetlana Alexievich Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “All of us who were there have a graveyard full of memories.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

52. “He knew that in order to survive, you only needed three things: bread, onions, and soap. Just.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

54. “More often, people were irritated with freedom. “I buy three newspapers and each one of them has its own version of the truth. Where’s the real truth? You used to be able to get up in the morning, read Pravda, and know all you needed to know, understand everything you needed to understand.” People.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

55. “There’s a Ukrainian woman sells big red apples at the market. She was touting her wares: ‘Come and get them! Apples from Chernobyl!’ Someone told her, ‘Don’t advertise the fact they’re from Chernobyl, love. No one will buy them.’ ‘Don’t you believe it! They’re selling well! People buy them for their mother-in-law or their boss!”

— Svetlana Alexievich

56. “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

57. “At first, the question was, Who’s to blame? But then, when we learned more, we started thinking, What should we do?”

— Svetlana Alexievich

58. “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

59. “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

60. “Thinking about money was bourgeois, thinking about your own life was unpatriotic. The normal state of life was hunger. 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

61. “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

62. “We all live through it by ourselves, we don’t know what else to do. I can’t understand it with my mind. My mother especially has felt confused. She teaches Russian literature, and she always taught me to live with books. But there are no books about this. She became confused. She doesn’t know how to do without books. Without Chekhov and Tolstoy.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

63. “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

64. “We’re all suffering from a wasting disease, you know. Over there it showed itself as a mismatch between our weight and our height, but here, back home, it’s a mismatch between our feelings and our ability to express them in what we say and do.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

65. “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

66. “Courage in war and courage of thought are two different courages. I used to think they were the same.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

67. “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

68. “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

69. “But I’m talking about something else – I think about it a lot. At the cemetery. Some people pray loudly, others quietly. And some people say: ‘Open up, yellow sand. Open up, dark night.’ The forest might do it, but the sand never will. I’ll ask gently: ‘Ivan. Ivan, how should I live?’ But he doesn’t answer me anything, one way or the other.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

70. “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

71. “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

72. “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

73. “Coming home was terribly difficult and very strange. I felt I’d had my skin ripped off. I couldn’t stop crying, I could bear to be only with people who’d been there themselves.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

74. “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

75. “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

76. “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

77. “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

78. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

80. “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

81. “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

82. “In the center there is always this: how unbearable and unthinkable it is to die. And how much more unbearable and unthinkable it is to kill, because a woman gives life. Gives it. Bears it in herself for a long time, nurses it. I understood that it is more difficult for women to kill.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

83. “I met this one man, he was saying that this is because we place a low value on human life. That it’s an Asiatic fatalism. A person who sacrifices himself doesn’t feel himself to be a unique individual. He experiences a longing for his role in life. Earlier he was a person without a text, a statistic. He had no theme, he served as the background. And now suddenly he’s the main protagonist. It’s a longing for meaning.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

84. “They asked all sorts of questions, but one really cut into my memory. This boy, stammering and blushing, you could tell he was one of the quiet ones, asked: “Why couldn’t anyone help the animals?” This was already a person from the future. I couldn’t answer that question. Our art is all about the sufferings and loves of people, but not of everything living. We don’t descend to their level: animals, plants, that other world. And with Chernobyl man just waved his hand at everything.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

85. “Any animal is afraid of a human. If you don’t touch him, he’ll walk around you. Used to be, you’d be in the forest and you’d hear human voices, you’d run toward them. Now people hide from one another. God save me from meeting a person in the forest!”

— Svetlana Alexievich

86. “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

87. “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

88. “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

89. “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

90. “This economic takeover, necessitating a great deal of corrupt maneuvering, also leads to the necessity of silencing criticism and dissent in the press.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

91. “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

92. “If you don’t play, you lose. There was a Ukrainian woman at the market selling big red apples. ‘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

93. “My feelings are my feelings, whether they feel good or hurt, I don’t want to be unplugged from myself.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

94. “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

95. “I’m searching for a language. People speak many different languages: There’s the one they use with children, another one for love. There’s the language we use to talk to ourselves, for our internal monologues. On the street, at work, while traveling – everywhere you go, you’ll hear something different, and it’s not just the words, there’s something else, too. There’s even a difference between the way people speak in the morning and how they speak at night...”

— Svetlana Alexievich

96. “We’d go into battle with one riffle for every four men. When they kill the first one, the second one grabs the riffle, after the second one, the next one. Meanwhile, the germans all had brand-new machine guns.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

97. “The soul will fly home of its own accord, but shipping a coffin is pretty expensive.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

98. “I can’t count money. My memory’s not right. The doctors can’t understand it. I go from hospital to hospital. But this sticks in my head: you’re walking up to the house, thinking the house is empty, and you open the door and there’s this cat. That, and those kids’ notes.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

99. “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

100. “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