Top 160 Svetlana Alexievich Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “I am afraid of man. And also I want to meet him. I want to meet a good person.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

103. “My past no longer protects me. There aren’t any answers there. They were there before, but now they’re not. The future is destroying me, not the past.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

104. “These people had already seen what for everyone else is still unknown. I felt like I was recording the future. Svetlana.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

105. “According to Abkhazian custom, the time you spend with guests around the table doesn’t count toward your lifespan because you’re drinking wine and enjoying yourself.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

106. “Question: Is the world as it’s depicted in words the real world? Words stand between the person and his soul. And.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

107. “Russians need “blacks” so they can feel “white.” So they have someone to look down on.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

108. “At night I wake up from my mother saying, “Sonny, why aren’t you saying anything? You’re not asleep, you’re lying there with your eyes open. And your light’s on.” I don’t say anything. No one can speak to me in a way I can answer. In my own language. No one can understand where I’ve come back from. And I can’t tell anyone.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

109. “After I got back I couldn’t bear to wear my ‘pre-war’ jeans and shirts. They belonged to some stranger, although they still smelt of me, as my mother assured me. That stranger no longer exists.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

110. “Truth is communal.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

111. “We share a communist collective memory. We’re neighbors in memory.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

112. “War kills time, precious human time.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

113. “Do you know how beautiful a morning at war can be? Before combat... You look and you know: this may be your last. The earth is so beautiful... And the air... And the dear sun...”

— Svetlana Alexievich

114. “Russian can’t convince another Russian of anything without obscenities. I.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

115. “Where are we going to get tens of thousands of dollars if my husband makes 120 dollars a month? One professor told us quietly: “With her pathologies, your child is of great interest to science. You should write to hospitals in other countries. They should be interested.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

116. “The only righteous thing on the face of the earth is death. No one has ever bribed their way out of that. The earth takes us all: the good, the evil and the sinners. And that’s all the justice you’ll find in this world.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

117. “Sometimes I get strange thoughts, sometimes I think Chernobyl saved me, forced me to think. My soul expanded. He.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

118. “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

119. “I, for instance, gave lectures in which I denounced the capitalists and defended blacks in America.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

120. “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

121. “Everyone found a justification for themselves, an explanation. I experimented on myself. And basically I found out that the frightening things in life happen quietly and naturally. Zoya.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

122. “Russian novels don’t teach you how to become successful.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

123. “You’re all like black boxes here,” he said. He meant the black boxes that record information on airplanes. We think that we’re living, talking, walking, eating. Loving one another. But we’re just recording information!”

— Svetlana Alexievich

124. “Any little knot, that was already a wound on him. I clipped my nails down till they bled so I wouldn’t accidentally cut him. None of the nurses could approach him; if they needed anything they’d call me. And.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

125. “I was in Afghanistan too. It was easier there. They just shot you.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

126. “The most important thing is spiritual labor... Books... You can wear the same suit for twenty years, two coats are enough for a lifetime, but you can’t live without Pushkin or the complete works of Gorky.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

127. “Pretty soon, I’ll be decomposing into phosphorous, calcium, and so on. Who else will you find to tell you the truth? All that’s left are the archives. Pieces of paper. And the truth is... I worked at an archive myself, I can tell you first hand: paper lies even more than people do.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

128. “Well, I admit it. I had the greatest respect for the Afghan people, even while I was shooting and killing them. I still do. You could even say I love them. I like their songs and prayers, as peaceful and timeless as their mountains.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

129. “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

130. “You’re young. Why are you doing this? That’s not a person anymore, that’s a nuclear reactor. You’ll just burn together.” I was like a dog, running after them. I’d stand for hours at their doors, begging and pleading. And then they’d say: “All right! The hell with you! You’re not normal!”

— Svetlana Alexievich

131. “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

132. “Chernobyl, while an accident in the sense that no one intentionally set it off, was also the deliberate product of a culture of cronyism, laziness, and a deep-seated indifference toward the general population.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

133. “Humanities” started sounding like a disease.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

134. “I’m a history teacher... within my memory the history textbook has been rewritten three times. I taught children with three different textbooks... Ask us while we’re alive. Don’t rewrite afterward without us. Ask...”

— Svetlana Alexievich

135. “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

136. “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

137. “People who’ve been through that kind of humiliation together, or who’ve seen what people can be like, at the bottom, run from one another. There’s something I felt in Chernobyl, something I understood that I don’t really want to talk about. About the fact, for example, that all our humanistic ideas are relative. In an extreme situation, people don’t behave the way you read about in books. Sooner the other way around. People aren’t heroes.“ – Sergei Gurin.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

138. “Many greeted the truth as an enemy. And freedom as well.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

139. “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

140. “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

141. “Once a week, whoever had really excelled at dirt-digging was presented with a certificate of merit in front of all of us, on parade. Top Radioactive Earth-Shoveller of the USSR. How mad was that?”

— Svetlana Alexievich

142. “Mankind is good, but the people are mean. Some.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

143. “Man frightens me, but I always like meeting one. A good man.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

144. “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

145. “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

146. “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

147. “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

148. “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

149. “Why is it that seventeenand eighteen-year-olds find it easier to kill than thirty-year-olds, for example? Because they have no pity, that’s why.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

150. “People yelled at them as they were leaving, that they were running away just like women. That they were cowards, betraying their motherland. But is that bad? Is it a bad thing not to be able to shoot?”

— Svetlana Alexievich