Top 180 Svetlana Alexievich Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 3 of 4

101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

106. “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

107. “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

108. “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

109. “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

110. “More than once afterward I met with these two truths that live in the same human being: one’s own truth driven underground, and the common one, filled with the spirit of the time.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

111. “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

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

118. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

121. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

124. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

126. “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

127. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

129. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

133. “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

134. “Today many people, especially the young, think it was only America that defeated Hitler. Little is known about the price the Soviet people paid for the victory – twenty million human lives in four years.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

135. “I used to think that if I told someone about this, afterward I would have to run away from that person and never see them again.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

136. “Son demasiados los casos en que las palabras nos alejaron de la verdad.”

— 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. “I got as far as Berlin. I put my signature on the Reichstag: “I, Sofya Kuntsevich, came here to kill war.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

139. “I accepted the official line so completely that even now, after all I’ve read and heard, I still have a minute hope that our lives weren’t entirely wasted. It’s the self-preservation instinct at work.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

140. “How much can we value human life when we know that not long ago people had died by the millions? We’re full of hatred and superstitions. All of us come from the land of the gulag and harrowing war.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

141. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

143. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

145. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

147. “I’m afraid of freedom, it feels like some drunk guy could show up and burn my dacha at any moment.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

148. “I guess that’s how you experience your own death, from a distance.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

149. “Sometimes I think it’d be better if you didn’t write about us. Then people wouldn’t be so afraid. No one talks about cancer in the home of a person who’s sick with it. And if someone is in jail with a life sentence, no one mentions that, either.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

150. “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