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" I'm not a public person. "

Svetlana Alexievich

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

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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

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" 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. "

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" Love is what brings us into this world. "

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" 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

" 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. "

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

Svetlana Alexievich

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

Svetlana Alexievich

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

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

" 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

" 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

" I love how humans talk. "

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

" The subjects I wanted to write about - the mystery of the human soul, evil - didn't interest newspapers, and news reporting bored me. "

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

" 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

" 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

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

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 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

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

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

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

Svetlana Alexievich

" The purpose of art is to accumulate the human within the human being. "

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

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" 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