Top 160 Svetlana Alexievich Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 2 of 4

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

61. “There’s no television. No movies. There’s one thing to do – look out the window. Well, and to pray, of course. There used to be Communism instead of God, but now there’s just God. So we pray.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

62. “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

63. “A young woman was sitting on a bench by her house, breastfeeding. We tested her breast milk and it was radioactive. The Madonna of Chernobyl.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

64. “People ask me: “Why don’t you take photos in color? In color!” But Chernobyl: literally it means black event. There are no other colors there.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

65. “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

66. “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

67. “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

68. “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

69. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

71. “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

72. “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

73. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

75. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

78. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

80. “We’re afraid of everything. We’re afraid for our children, and for our grandchildren, who don’t exist yet. They don’t exist, and we’re already afraid. People smile less, they sing less at holidays. The landscape changes, because instead of fields the forest rises up again, but the national character changes too. Everyone’s depressed. It’s a feeling of doom. Chernobyl is a metaphor, a symbol. And it’s changed our everyday life, and our thinking.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

81. “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

82. “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

83. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

85. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

91. “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

92. “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

93. “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

94. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

96. “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

97. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

99. “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

100. “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