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" 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

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

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" 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

" 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. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" 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. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" I will never write fiction. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" I'm interested in love and in death. Everything evolves from these things. "

Svetlana Alexievich

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

Svetlana Alexievich

" My father was an important person, the director of the school. He could talk to anybody - simple or educated. He liked chess, fishing, and beautiful women. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" '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. "

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

" 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

" 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. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" For money, I can buy one thing: I buy freedom. "

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

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

Svetlana Alexievich

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

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

" We need a philosophy for humans and nature to live together. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" 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. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" There are horrible periods in which entire nations sink into the plague of darkness and hatred. "

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

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

Svetlana Alexievich

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

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 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. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" I don't hate. I love the Russian people. I love the Belarusan people... I love Ukraine very much. "

Svetlana Alexievich

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

Svetlana Alexievich

" Nobody thought the Soviet Union would collapse; it was a shock for everyone. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" 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. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" 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. "

Svetlana Alexievich