A biography for Svetlana Alexievichhasn’t been written yet.
“Women are the most denigrated social group in the Soviet Union. The idea of women's emancipation is only a slogan in - but also, I should say, in many places outside - the Soviet Union. But especially in the militaristic Soviet society, people only thought of life in terms of struggle and the workers' toil.”
“I grew up in the countryside.”
“The mysterious Russian soul... Everyone wants to understand it. They read Dostoevsky: what's behind that soul of theirs? Well, behind our soul there's just more soul.”
“When I see a garden in flower, then I believe in God for a second. But not the rest of the time”
“Art is always kind of snooping and listening in.”
“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.”
“The purpose of art is to accumulate the human within the human being.”
“For me, people are like the black boxes found in the debris of airplane crashes.”
“I believe that in the 21st century, we should arm ourselves with ideas.”
“I love the lone human voice. It is my greatest love and passion.”
“Instead of lullabies, my mother would sing us songs of the Revolution. Now she sings them to her grandchildren. 'Are you nuts?' I ask her. She replies, 'I don't know any other songs.”
“People always speak beautifully when they are in love or close to death.”
“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.”
“I don't love great ideas. I love the little human being.”
“Ten to 15 of my childhood friends from Minsk died of cancer. Chernobyl kills.”
“Death is the fairest thing in the world. No one's ever gotten out of it. The earth takes everyone - the kind, the cruel, the sinners. Aside from that, there's no fairness on earth.”
“I love how humans talk.”
“The books that I'm writing, you can write them only when you're amongst your people. You're not going to find it on the Internet. You're not going to hear it there.”
“What I'm concerned with is what I would call the missing history - the invisible imprint of our stay on Earth and in time.”
“Hatred will always give birth to more and more hate, and love has the power to demolish the borders between us.”