Top 160 Svetlana Alexievich Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

53. “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

54. “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

55. “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

56. “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

57. “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

58. “That first March a pile grew up behind the hospital – a pile of amputated arms, legs and other bits of our men. Dead bodies with gouged-out eyes, and stars carved into the skin of their backs and stomachs by the mujahedin.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

59. “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

60. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

62. “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

63. “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

64. “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

65. “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

66. “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

67. “The history of the atom – it’s not just a military secret and a curse. It’s also our youth, our era, our religion.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

68. “Our people need freedom like a monkey needs glasses. No one would know what to do with it.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

69. “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

70. “War and prision are the two most important words in the Russian language.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

71. “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

72. “No one had taught us what freedom means. We’d only ever learned how to die for freedom.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

73. “Recordar es, sobre todo, un acto creativo. Al relatar, la gente crea, redacta, su vida.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

74. “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

75. “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

76. “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

77. “Don’t write about the wonders of Soviet heroism. They existed – and they really were wonders. But first there had to be incompetence, negligence, and only after those did you get wonders: covering the embrasure, throwing yourself in front of a machine gun. But that those orders should never have been given, that there shouldn’t have been any need, no one writes about that.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

79. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

81. “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

82. “All of us who were there have a graveyard full of memories.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

85. “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

86. “En la guerra, el alma del ser humano envejece.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

87. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

89. “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

90. “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

91. “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

92. “A door that can only be opened with love.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

93. “I want to make a film, to see everything through the eyes of an animal. “What are you shooting?” people say to me. “Look around you. There’s a war on in Chechnya.” But Saint Francis preached to the birds. He spoke to them as equals. What if these birds spoke to him in their bird language, and it wasn’t he who condescended to them?”

— Svetlana Alexievich

94. “I’ve forgotten everything... even love... but I still remember the war...”

— Svetlana Alexievich

95. “I spend most of my time crying and praying for that bookish Moscow girl who doesn’t exist any more.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

96. “I’ll explain it to you: it’s terrible to remember, but it’s far more terrible not to remember.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

97. “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

98. “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

99. “How much can we value human life when we know that not long ago people had died by the millions? We’re full of hatred and superstitions. All of us come from the land of the gulag and harrowing war.”

— 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