Top 180 Svetlana Alexievich Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “The soul will fly home of its own accord, but shipping a coffin is pretty expensive.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

108. “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

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

117. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

119. “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

120. “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

121. “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

122. “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

123. “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

124. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

127. “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

128. “What helps me? That we are used to living together. Communally. We are communal people. With us everything is in common – both happiness and tears. We know how to suffer and how to tell people about our suffering. Suffering justifies our hard and ungainly life. For us pain is art. I must admit, women boldly set out this path.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

129. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

131. “Man saved only himself: everything else he betrayed.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

132. “Truth is communal.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

134. “Yur Karyakin once wrote: ‘We should not judge a man’s life by his perception of himself. Such a perception may be tragically inadequate.’ And I read something in Kafka to the effect that man was irretrievably lost within himself.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

135. “During the war, one out of every four Belarussians was killed; today, one out of every five Belarussians lives on contaminated land. This amounts to 2.1 million people, of whom 700,000 are children. Among the demographic factors responsible for the depopulation of Belarus, radiation is number one. In the Gomel and Mogilev regions, which suffered the most from Chernobyl, mortality rates exceed birth rates by 20%. As.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

137. “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

138. “But there’s no need to pity us. We’re proud. Let them rewrite history ten times. With Stalin or without Stalin. But this remains-we were victorious! And our sufferings. What we lived through. This isn’t junk and ashes. This is our life.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

140. “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

141. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

143. “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

144. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

146. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

148. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

150. “So... Well... Life went by... The only thing money can’t buy is time. Weep before God or not, you can’t buy it. That’s just the way it is.”

— Svetlana Alexievich