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" I do not remember any questions in my childhood other than questions about death and about loss, and it was clear that the books that filled the house were not as interesting as the conversations outside. "

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" Flaubert called himself a human pen; I would say that I am a human ear. When I walk down the street and catch words, phrases, and exclamations, I always think - how many novels disappear without a trace! Disappear into darkness. "

Svetlana Alexievich

Words

Walk

Darkness

" 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. "

Svetlana Alexievich

Memories

Life

" Putin is not a politician. Putin is a KGB agent. And whatever he does is provocations, which KGB is usually involved in. "

Svetlana Alexievich

Politician

Whatever

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" Journalists do not write about human feelings. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I couldn't get published for three years. Then the times changed: glasnost, perestroika. So, for three years, I wasn't allowed to publish 'The Unwomanly Face of War,' but then it changed. "

" I grew up in the countryside. "

Svetlana Alexievich

Grew

Countryside

" 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. "

" I'm interested in little people. 'The little, great people' is how I would put it, because suffering expands people. "

" My Ukrainian grandmother would tell amazing stories. She lost her father, and as children, we would always listen to her stories. "

" We, people of socialism, are not like others. We have our peculiar ideas about heroes and martyrs. "

" 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. "

" A man without a memory is only capable of doing evil, nothing else but evil. "

" I was always meant to study the humanities; I was no good at math or sciences. When it came time for me to work, it was Soviet times, and journalism wasn't that free or interesting of a space. There was a lot of censorship; it was difficult. "

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

" Many times, I have been shocked and frightened by human beings. I have experienced delight and revulsion. I have sometimes wanted to forget what I heard, to return to a time when I lived in ignorance. More than once, however, I have seen the sublime in people and wanted to cry. "

" I've been searching for a genre that would be most adequate to my vision of the world to convey how my ear hears and my eyes see life. I tried this and that, and finally, I chose a genre where human voices speak for themselves. But I don't just record a dry history of events and facts; I'm writing a history of human feelings. "

" I have collected the history of 'domestic,' 'indoor' socialism, bit by bit. The history of how it played out in the human soul. I am drawn to that small space called a human being... a single individual. In reality, that is where everything happens. "

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

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

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

" Communism has not died. We naively thought in the '90s we had buried communism, but this is not true. It is not dead, and it will be coming back. "

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

" Nothing, not even human life, is more precious to us than our myths about ourselves. "

" I am a writer who happens to use some tools of journalism. "