Top 180 Svetlana Alexievich Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “Mankind is good, but the people are mean. Some.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

155. “I’ve forgotten everything... even love... but I still remember the war...”

— Svetlana Alexievich

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

157. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

164. “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

165. “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

166. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

169. “Truth is communal.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

171. “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

172. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

174. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

176. “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

177. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

179. “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

180. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

182. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich