Top 100 Quotes & Sayings by Svetlana Alexievich

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.

Putin has mobilized and gathered the desires of millions upon millions of people who have been lied to, cheated, who lost out in the new order of things - and in each of these people is a bit of Putin. They have come together to make the image we know as Putin. Putin himself is just the tip of an iceberg.

There are horrible periods in which entire nations sink into the plague of darkness and hatred.

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.

Why do I write? I have been called a writer of catastrophes, but that isn't true. I am always looking for words of love. Hate will not save us. Only love.

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

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.

I love the good Russian world, the humanitarian Russian world, but I do not love the Russian world of Beria, Stalin, and Shoigu.

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

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

I want to live at home. You can only write at home.

In the post-Soviet era, instead of freedom, various stripes of autocratic-totalitarianism have flourished: Russian, Belarusian, Kazakh... We are finding our way out from under the debris of the 'Red Empire' slowly and tentatively.

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

I am a writer who happens to use some tools of journalism.

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.

My father was an important person, the director of the school. He could talk to anybody - simple or educated. He liked chess, fishing, and beautiful women.

Reality has always attracted me like a magnet; it tortured and hypnotized me. I wanted to capture it on paper.

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

I've been searching for a genre that would be most adequate to my vision of the world to convey how my ear hears and my eyes see life. I tried this and that, and finally, I chose a genre where human voices speak for themselves. But I don't just record a dry history of events and facts; I'm writing a history of human feelings.

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

The purpose of art is to accumulate the human within the human being.

For money, I can buy one thing: I buy freedom.

Putin is not a politician. Putin is a KGB agent. And whatever he does is provocations, which KGB is usually involved in.

I don't remember men in our village after World War II: during the war, one out of four Belarusians perished, either fighting at the front or with the partisans. After the war, we children lived in a world of women. What I remember most is that women talked about love, not death.

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.

'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.

A totalitarian power is mainly busy in keeping itself alive.

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.

Love is what brings us into this world.

The subjects I wanted to write about - the mystery of the human soul, evil - didn't interest newspapers, and news reporting bored me.

I don't love great ideas. I love the little human being.

Stalin's machine can be started up again at only a moment's notice: the same informers, the same denunciations, the same tortures. The same universal, all-devouring terror.

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.

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

I was always meant to study the humanities; I was no good at math or sciences. When it came time for me to work, it was Soviet times, and journalism wasn't that free or interesting of a space. There was a lot of censorship; it was difficult.

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.

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

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

From the point of view of art, the butcher and the victim are equal as people. You need to see the people.

I grew up in the countryside.

When people talk, it matters how they place words next to each other.

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

I collect the everyday life of feelings, thoughts, and words. I collect the life of my time.

In the West, people demonize Putin. They do not understand that there is a collective Putin, consisting of some millions of people who do not want to be humiliated by the West. There is a little piece of Putin in everyone.

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

My Ukrainian grandmother would tell amazing stories. She lost her father, and as children, we would always listen to her stories.

I always aim to understand how much humanity is contained in each human being and how I can protect this humanity in a person.

Art is always kind of snooping and listening in.

I was born in a big city - Ivano-Frankivsk in Ukraine - but when I was a child, my father moved us back to his homeland in Minsk.

What I'm concerned with is what I would call the missing history - the invisible imprint of our stay on Earth and in time.

There are many oral historians in America, but my books are made using the rules of novel writing. I have a beginning, a plot, characters.

Flaubert called himself a human pen; I would say that I am a human ear. When I walk down the street and catch words, phrases, and exclamations, I always think - how many novels disappear without a trace! Disappear into darkness.

A man without a memory is only capable of doing evil, nothing else but evil.

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

I've known since I was five that I wanted to be a writer.

I don't hate. I love the Russian people. I love the Belarusan people... I love Ukraine very much.

All of history misses out on the history of the soul. Human passions are so often not included in history.

Women tell things in more interesting ways. They live with more feeling. They observe themselves and their lives. Men are more impressed with action. For them, the sequence of events is more important.

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

Nobody thought the Soviet Union would collapse; it was a shock for everyone.