Top 160 Svetlana Alexievich Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “A soldier must be like a bullet, constantly ready to be fired.’ I learnt that by heart. You go to war in order to kill. Killing is my profession – that’s what I was trained to do.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

108. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

111. “The doctors said that I got sick because my father worked at Chernobyl. And after that I was born. I love my father.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

112. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

121. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

124. “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

125. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

128. “Truth is communal.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

130. “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

131. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

133. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

135. “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

136. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

138. “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

139. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

141. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

143. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

145. “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

146. “Els grans botxins no se’n surten sense els petits. Se’n necessiten molts per a fer la feina bruta.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

149. “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

150. “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