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

Svetlana Alexievich

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

Svetlana Alexievich

" I used to live in a village, and I always loved listening to old people. Unfortunately, it was always women who were talking, because after the war, very few men were around. I spent my entire life living in the village. The village is always talking about itself; people are talking to each other as the village makes sense of itself. "

Svetlana Alexievich

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

Svetlana Alexievich

" 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. "

Svetlana Alexievich

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

Svetlana Alexievich

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

Svetlana Alexievich

" 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. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" I love to sit on my own and think, not to be photographed all the time. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" I grew up in the countryside. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" 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. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" Humans have occupied a position in nature that they should not. It is impossible for humans to conquer nature. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" I have always grappled with the fact that the truth cannot be packaged into one soul or one mind alone. It is something fragmented: there is so much to it; the truth is varied and scattered across the world. "

Svetlana Alexievich

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

Svetlana Alexievich

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

Svetlana Alexievich

" Journalists do not write about human feelings. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" It's very important to listen when someone is speaking up. I always keep my ear to the ground. "

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 is like a human face. We have as many stories as human faces. You might have similar facial features, but they're all a little different. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" In apartments and cottages, on the street and in the train... I listen... More and more, I turn into one large ear, always turning to another person. "

Svetlana Alexievich

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

Svetlana Alexievich

" A totalitarian power is mainly busy in keeping itself alive. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" 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. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" My writing is not just all facts and voices. I strive to create a text that works as a sign, pointing out undercurrents that lie beneath the facts. "

Svetlana Alexievich

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

Svetlana Alexievich

" 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. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" Hatred, I think, is an organism that penetrates our skin in a mythic fashion and does not leave. "

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 same universal, all-devouring terror. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" Being in the public eye is easy for me because I come from a family of four generations of teachers, so I'm used to being around books and discussions. But to write, I very much need to be alone. "

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 free, because these people don't understand what freedom is. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" 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. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" America is a remarkable country, but I have a feeling that it's a different country after 9/11. "

Svetlana Alexievich