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" I believe that in the 21st century, we should arm ourselves with ideas. "

Svetlana Alexievich

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

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

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

Svetlana Alexievich

" I don't remember men in our village after World War II: during the war, one out of four Belarusians perished, either fighting at the front or with the partisans. After the war, we children lived in a world of women. What I remember most is that women talked about love, not death. "

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

" 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. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" I was born in a big city - Ivano-Frankivsk in Ukraine - but when I was a child, my father moved us back to his homeland in Minsk. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" I write my books at moments of shock. I meet people in extremis and their stories are highly emotionally charged. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" Real people speak in my books about the main events of the age, such as the war, the Chernobyl disaster, and the downfall of a great empire. "

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

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

Svetlana Alexievich

" Showing just the dark side doesn't always work. The important thing is to show what we can learn from dark things, what good we find there. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" I name the genre that I write in as 'novel of voices.' "

Svetlana Alexievich

" Freedom is not an instantaneous holiday, as we once dreamed. It is a road. A long road. We know this now. "

Svetlana Alexievich

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

Svetlana Alexievich

" We are all prisoners of the ideas of the times we live in. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" I grew up in a village after the war, and in the village, there were almost only women. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" Belarus is a closed, authoritarian system, and the theme of Chernobyl is also a closed topic. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" In the post-Soviet era, instead of freedom, various stripes of autocratic-totalitarianism have flourished: Russian, Belarusian, Kazakh... We are finding our way out from under the debris of the 'Red Empire' slowly and tentatively. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" I'm not a public person. "

Svetlana Alexievich

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

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

" 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

" Love is what brings us into this world. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" I always aim to understand how much humanity is contained in each human being and how I can protect this humanity in a person. "

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

" In the West, people demonize Putin. They do not understand that there is a collective Putin, consisting of some millions of people who do not want to be humiliated by the West. There is a little piece of Putin in everyone. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" I have three homes: my Belarusian land, the homeland of my father, where I have lived my whole life; Ukraine, the homeland of my mother, where I was born; and Russia's great culture, without which I cannot imagine myself. All are very dear to me. "

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

" Every one of his characters has their own idea, their own thing they want to express. Dostoevsky just lets them do it. "

Svetlana Alexievich