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

52. “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

53. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

55. “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

56. “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

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

61. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

63. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

65. “In telling his own story, a person creates; he doesn’t copy reality, he creates. Memories are living creatures. People put their entire lives into their memories: what they read, what they thought about, whether they were happy or not. Documents evolve along with the human soul.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

66. “Let time be the judge. Time is just, but only in the long term – not in the short term. The time we won’t live to see, which will be free of our prejudices.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

67. “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

68. “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

69. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

72. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

75. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

77. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

79. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

81. “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

82. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

84. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

86. “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

87. “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

88. “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

89. “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

90. “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

91. “They’re all Tajiks, they have the same Koran, the same faith, but the Kulyabs kill the Pamirs, and the Pamirs kill the Kulyabs. First they’d go out into the city square, yelling, praying. I wanted to understand what was happening, so I went too. I asked one of the old men: “What are you protesting against?” They said: “Against the Parliament. They told us this was a very bad person, this Parliament.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

92. “The feelings and language of educated people, strange as it may be, are often more subject to the working of time. Its general encrypting. They are infected by secondary knowledge. By myths.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

93. “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

94. “No one knows what’s in the other world. It’s better here. More familiar.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

95. “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

96. “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

97. “Today many people, especially the young, think it was only America that defeated Hitler. Little is known about the price the Soviet people paid for the victory – twenty million human lives in four years.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

98. “I used to think that if I told someone about this, afterward I would have to run away from that person and never see them again.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

99. “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

100. “Quant pot valdre la vida humana si recordem que fa poc morien milions de persones per causes no naturals? Estem plens d’odi i de prejudicis.”

— Svetlana Alexievich