Svetlana Alexievich Quotes

There are horrible periods in which entire nations sink into the plague of darkness and hatred.
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.
There is no need to give in to the compromise that totalitarian regimes always count on.
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.
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.
We are all prisoners of the ideas of the times we live in.
We need a philosophy for humans and nature to live together.
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.
We were romantics in the 1990s and thought that communism was dead. But 10 years passed, and Putin came, and it became obvious that the process is reversible; that communism will, to varying degrees, return again and again.
We, people of socialism, are not like others. We have our peculiar ideas about heroes and martyrs.
What I'm concerned with is what I would call the missing history - the invisible imprint of our stay on Earth and in time.
What is life about? Two things: love and death.
What you have to remember about Belarus is that it's a small state - it has a population of less than 10m people - and like many small states, it has to be very careful about its relationships.
When I was a child, women spoke to me of how all they had was their memories, how their husbands went to war and never came back, so many tragedies. That chorus of voices filled my consciousness. It was part of life itself.
When people talk, it matters how they place words next to each other.
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.
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.
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.
'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.
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.
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AuthorName
Svetlana Alexievich
Profession
Journalist
BirthDate
31 May, 1948
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