Svetlana Alexievich

Love is what brings us into this world.

— Svetlana Alexievich

My wish is to humanize history.

— Svetlana Alexievich

I love how humans talk.

— Svetlana Alexievich

I will never write fiction.

— Svetlana Alexievich

I grew up in the countryside.

— Svetlana Alexievich

I'm not a public person.

— Svetlana Alexievich

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

Art is always kind of snooping and listening in.

— Svetlana Alexievich

“No one understands a stranger’s tragedy, God willing you might understand your own.”

— Svetlana Alexievich

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

People always speak beautifully when they are in love or close to death.

— Svetlana Alexievich

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

“Hoši, nešiřte se o tom, co bylo a co jste viděli. Je to státní tajemství! Sto tisíc vojáků v cizí zemi je…

— Svetlana Alexievich

I was born in a big city - Ivano-Frankivsk in Ukraine - but when I was a child, my father moved us…

— Svetlana Alexievich

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

Stalin's machine can be started up again at only a moment's notice: the same informers, the same denunciations, the same tortures. The…

— Svetlana Alexievich

I see the world as voices, as colors, as it were. From book to book, I change, the subjects change, but the…

— Svetlana Alexievich

I couldn't get published for three years. Then the times changed: glasnost, perestroika. So, for three years, I wasn't allowed to publish…

— Svetlana Alexievich

“A nikdo si nepoložil otázku, čím to, že nám najednou v armádě začali umírat devatenáctiletí kluci. Způsobila to vodka nebo chřipka? Nebo…

— Svetlana Alexievich

I don't want to be like other authors and say that there are only a few story lines in literature. A story…

— Svetlana Alexievich

I was always meant to study the humanities; I was no good at math or sciences. When it came time for me…

— Svetlana Alexievich

“We were evacuated to Stalingrad. And when Stalingrad was besieged, we volunteered to go to the front. All together. The whole family:…

— Svetlana Alexievich

“po několika letech od doby, kdy kniha Zinkoví chlapci vyšla tiskem u nás i ve světě!), vyvolávají soudní proces pro „urážku na…

— Svetlana Alexievich

Putin has mobilized and gathered the desires of millions upon millions of people who have been lied to, cheated, who lost out…

— Svetlana Alexievich

We thought we'd leave communism behind, and everything would turn out fine. But it turns out you can't leave this and become…

— Svetlana Alexievich

“Reality has always attracted me like a magnet, tortured and hypnotized me, and I wanted to capture it on paper. So I…

— Svetlana Alexievich

“We were eight children in our family, the first four were all girls, I was the oldest. Papa once came home from…

— Svetlana Alexievich

“Mientras duró la guerra, yo no reflexionaba, pero después comencé a pensar. A rebobinar... Todo aquello se repetía una y otra vez...…

— Svetlana Alexievich

“The Germans rolled back, and a wounded lieutenant, the artillerist Kostia Khudov, was left in no-man’s-land. The orderlies who tried to bring…

— Svetlana Alexievich

“Don’t call these the “wonders of Soviet heroism" when you write about it. Those wonders really did exist. But first there had…

— Svetlana Alexievich

“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…

— Svetlana Alexievich

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

“Many greeted the truth as an enemy. And freedom as well.”

— Svetlana Alexievich