Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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

Related Quotes:

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

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

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

Svetlana Alexievich

" I grew up in the countryside. "

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 love great ideas. I love the little human being. "

Svetlana Alexievich

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

Svetlana Alexievich

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

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

" 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

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

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

" 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. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" Putin has mobilized and gathered the desires of millions upon millions of people who have been lied to, cheated, who lost out in the new order of things - and in each of these people is a bit of Putin. They have come together to make the image we know as Putin. Putin himself is just the tip of an iceberg. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" Journalists do not write about human feelings. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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

" 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

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

Svetlana Alexievich

" I love the good Russian world, the humanitarian Russian world, but I do not love the Russian world of Beria, Stalin, and Shoigu. "

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

" 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

" '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'm not a public person. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" My wish is to humanize history. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" I've known since I was five that I wanted to be a writer. "

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

" 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