Top 180 Svetlana Alexievich Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “Els grans botxins no se’n surten sense els petits. Se’n necessiten molts per a fer la feina bruta.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

158. “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

159. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

165. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

167. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

171. “We’d go into battle with one riffle for every four men. When they kill the first one, the second one grabs the riffle, after the second one, the next one. Meanwhile, the germans all had brand-new machine guns.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

172. “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

173. “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

174. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

176. “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

177. “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

178. “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

179. “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

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

182. “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

183. “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