Top 45 Svetlana Alexievich Quotes

I take a very long time to write my books – from five to ten years.

I grew up in a village after the war, and in the village, there were almost only women.

Being in the public eye is easy for me because I come from a family of four generations of teachers, so I’m used to being around books and discussions. But to write, I very much need to be alone.

There is no need to give in to the compromise that totalitarian regimes always count on.

We, people of socialism, are not like others. We have our peculiar ideas about heroes and martyrs.

I have always grappled with the fact that the truth cannot be packaged into one soul or one mind alone. It is something fragmented: there is so much to it; the truth is varied and scattered across the world.

I name the genre that I write in as ‘novel of voices.’

Real people speak in my books about the main events of the age, such as the war, the Chernobyl disaster, and the downfall of a great empire.

I’m interested in little people. ‘The little, great people’ is how I would put it, because suffering expands people.

I love the lone human voice. It is my greatest love and passion.

What is life about? Two things: love and death.

I’m interested in the history of the soul: the everyday life of the soul, the things that the big picture of history usually omits – or disdains.

No book about Soviet sacrifice was as strong as the women’s stories I heard as a child.

Lukashenko is very much like Trump, because democracy and Trump are incompatible things.

I have collected the history of ‘domestic,’ ‘indoor’ socialism, bit by bit. The history of how it played out in the human soul. I am drawn to that small space called a human being… a single individual. In reality, that is where everything happens.

There is this tradition, stretching back to Tacitus and Plutarch, that history belongs to the heroes, the emperors. But I grew up among simple people, and their stories just shattered me. It was painful that no one but me was listening to them.

Every one of his characters has their own idea, their own thing they want to express. Dostoevsky just lets them do it.

Freedom is not an instantaneous holiday, as we once dreamed. It is a road. A long road. We know this now.

America is a remarkable country, but I have a feeling that it’s a different country after 9/11.

I have three homes: my Belarusian land, the homeland of my father, where I have lived my whole life; Ukraine, the homeland of my mother, where I was born; and Russia’s great culture, without which I cannot imagine myself. All are very dear to me.

I can’t rid myself of the feeling that war is a product of the male nature.

Communism has not died. We naively thought in the ’90s we had buried communism, but this is not true. It is not dead, and it will be coming back.

To be in conflict with the authorities is one thing. We Russian writers have got used to that. But to be in conflict with your own people – that is truly terrible.

I’m not a public person.

I see the world as voices, as colors, as it were. From book to book, I change, the subjects change, but the narrative thread remains the same.

I write my books at moments of shock. I meet people in extremis and their stories are highly emotionally charged.

We thought we’d leave communism behind, and everything would turn out fine. But it turns out you can’t leave this and become free, because these people don’t understand what freedom is.

I grew up in the countryside.

Many times, I have been shocked and frightened by human beings. I have experienced delight and revulsion. I have sometimes wanted to forget what I heard, to return to a time when I lived in ignorance. More than once, however, I have seen the sublime in people and wanted to cry.

I don’t think we should be deceived that art is such a moral thing.

We are all prisoners of the ideas of the times we live in.

I love how humans talk.

Hatred will always give birth to more and more hate, and love has the power to demolish the borders between us.

I’m interested in love and in death. Everything evolves from these things.

‘Women’s’ war has its own colors, its own smells, its own lighting, and its own range of feelings. There are no heroes and incredible feats; there are simply people who are busy doing inhumanly human things.

I will never write fiction.

All our lives, we fight for certain ideals, and they get diluted, and then we have to fight for them again.

Ten to 15 of my childhood friends from Minsk died of cancer. Chernobyl kills.

In apartments and cottages, on the street and in the train… I listen… More and more, I turn into one large ear, always turning to another person.

You might say that my work is just simply lying on the ground, and I go and I gather it, and I pick it up, and I put it together.

Art is always kind of snooping and listening in.

For me, people are like the black boxes found in the debris of airplane crashes.

I do not remember any questions in my childhood other than questions about death and about loss, and it was clear that the books that filled the house were not as interesting as the conversations outside.

I couldn’t get published for three years. Then the times changed: glasnost, perestroika. So, for three years, I wasn’t allowed to publish ‘The Unwomanly Face of War,’ but then it changed.

Love is what brings us into this world.