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Svetlana Alexievich QUOTES

Svetlana Alexievich QUOTES

1 " 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. "

― Svetlana Alexievich , Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

2 " Is there anything more frightening than people? "

― Svetlana Alexievich , Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

3 " How were you taken prisoner?' The interrogator asked my father. 'The Finns pulled me out of a lake.' 'You traitor! You were saving your own skin instead of the Motherland.' My father also considered himself guilty. That's how they'd been trained. "

― Svetlana Alexievich , Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

4 " I'm afraid of freedom, it feels like some drunk guy could show up and burn my dacha at any moment. "

― Svetlana Alexievich , Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

5 " 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. "

― Svetlana Alexievich , Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

6 " 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 , Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

7 " When I see a garden in flower, then I believe in God for a second. But not the rest of the time "

― Svetlana Alexievich

8 " Show me a fantasy novel about Chernobyl--there isn't one! Because reality is more fantastic. "

― Svetlana Alexievich , Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

9 " 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. "

― Svetlana Alexievich , Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

10 " Why didn't we put Stalin on trial? I'll tell you why...In order to condemn Stalin, you'd have to condemn your friends and relatives along with him. The people closest to you...our neighbor Yuri turned out to have been the one who informed on my father. For nothing, as my mother would say...When Yeltsin came to power, I got a copy of his file, which included several informants' reports. It turned out that one of them had been written by Aunt Olga...his niece...a beautiful woman, full of joy...It's not just Stalin and Beria, it's also our neighbor Yuri and beautiful Aunt Olga... "

― Svetlana Alexievich , Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

11 " Many greeted the truth as an enemy. And freedom as well. "

― Svetlana Alexievich , Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

12 " We were told that we had to win. Against whom? The atom? Physics? The universe? Victory is not an event for us, but a process. "

― Svetlana Alexievich , Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

13 " A veces oigo una música... O una canción... Una voz de mujer... Y allí encuentro lo que he sentido. Algo semejante... En cambio, veo una película de guerra y sabe a mentira, leo un libro y lo mismo, mentira. No es... No es correcto. Comienzo a hablar y tampoco me sale. No es tan espantoso, ni tan bonito. ¿Sabe lo preciosos que resultan los amaneceres en la guerra? Antes de un combate... Los observas y estás segura: ese podría ser el último. La tierra es tan bella... Y el aire... Y el sol... "

― Svetlana Alexievich

14 " We had a motherland, and now it's gone. What am I? My mother's Ukrainian, my father's Russian. I was born and raised in Kyrgyzstan, and I married a Tatar. So what are my kids? What is their nationality? We're all mixed up, our blood is all mixed together. On our passports, my kids and mine, it says 'Russian', but we're not Russian. We're Soviet! But that country- where I was born- no longer exists. "

― Svetlana Alexievich , Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

15 " I believe that in each of us there is a small piece of history. In one half a page, in another two or three. Together we write the book of time. We each call out our own truth. The nightmare of nuances. "

― Svetlana Alexievich , War's Unwomanly Face

16 " Everything we know of horror and dread is connected primarily with war. Stalin's Gulags and Auschwitz were recent gains for evil. History has always been the story of wars and military commanders, and war was, we could say, the yardstick of horror. This is why people muddle the concepts of war and disaster. In Chernobyl, we see all the hallmarks of war: hordes of soldiers, evacuation, abandoned houses. The course of life disrupted. Reports on Chernobyl in the newspapers are thick with the language of war: 'nuclear', 'explosion', 'heroes'. And this makes it harder to appreciate that we now find ourselves on a new page of history. The history of disasters has begun. But people do not want to reflect on that, because they have never thought about it before, preferring to take refuge in the familiar. And in the past. Even the monuments to the Chernobyl heroes look like war memorials. "

― Svetlana Alexievich , Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

17 " His friend proposed to me. He'd been in love with me long ago, back when we were in school. Then he married my friend, and then they got divorced. "You'll live like a queen."
He owns a store, has a huge apartment in the city, he had a dacha. I thought and thought about it. Then one day he came in drunk: "You're not going to forget your hero, is that it?" He went to Chernobyl, and I refused. I'm alive, and he's a memorial. "

― Svetlana Alexievich , Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

18 " We're afraid of everything. We're afraid for our children, and for our grandchildren, who don't exist yet. They don't exist, and we're already afraid. People smile less, they sing less at holidays. The landscape changes, because instead of fields the forest rises up again, but the national character changes too. Everyone's depressed. It's a feeling of doom. Chernobyl is a metaphor, a symbol. And it's changed our everyday life, and our thinking. "

― Svetlana Alexievich , Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

19 " They wash the windows, the roof, the door, all of it. Then a crane drags the house from its spot and puts it down into the pit. There's dolls and books and cans all scattered around. The excavator picks them up. Then it covers everything with sand and clay, leveling it. And then instead of a village, you have an empty field. They sowed our land with corn. Our house is lying there, and our school and our village council office. My plants are there and two albums of stamps, I was hoping to bring them with me. Also I had a bike. "

― Svetlana Alexievich , Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

20 " No one listened to us! No one listened to the scientists and the doctors. They pulled science and medicine into politics. Of course they did! "

― Svetlana Alexievich , Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster