Top 180 Svetlana Alexievich Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

55. “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

56. “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

57. “Seventy-plus years in the Marxist-Leninist laboratory gave rise to a new man: Homo sovieticus. Some see.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

61. “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

62. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

64. “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

65. “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

66. “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

67. “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

68. “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

69. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

71. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

73. “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

74. “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

75. “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

76. “Women’s” war has its own colors, its own smells, its own lighting, and its own range of feelings. Its own words. There are no heroes and incredible feats, there are simply people who are busy doing inhumanly human things.”

— 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. “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

79. “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. And you try not to think that you may end up lying here, thousands of miles from home. There are men flying around in space but down here we go on killing each other as we have done for a thousand years, with bullets, knives and stones.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

81. “They call the souls down from heaven. Those who had people die this year cry, and those whose people died earlier, don’t. They talk, they remember. Everyone prays. And those who don’t know how to pray, also pray.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

83. “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

84. “There’s not much humanity in a human being – that’s what war taught me.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

86. “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

87. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

89. “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

90. “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

91. “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

92. “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

93. “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

94. “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

95. “A communist is someone who’s read Marx, an anticommunist is someone who’s understood him.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

96. “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

97. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

99. “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

100. “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